The room had become silent.
The only previous sound, Molly’s doctor’s soft and comforting tone, had disappeared when the doctor exited the room. The physician had given a short soliloquy about choices, personal decisions and living with dignity. The doctor had been kind; she had a warm smile and seemed to have a genuine interest in Molly’s well-being. But she finished speaking, rose slowly from her chair and left Molly alone with her thoughts and the faint breeze of the air conditioning vent.
And the three small pills on the table.
Molly leaned back and sighed. She rested her chin on her hand and reflected on her past experiences as a CEO, a trailblazer for women’s rights in the workplace, a fierce competitor and leader in her field. She remembered photos of her that had been printed in newspapers and magazines, showing her standing tall and confident as she spoke to crowds of employees and other citizens. She began coughing, a side effect of the poison she had agreed to have injected into her body in order to eradicate the disease that was already killing her. Molly gripped the armrests of her wheelchair to steady herself, wiped her lips with her handkerchief, and considered her current situation: frail, immobile and utterly exhausted.
She glanced back at the pills sitting innocently on the table, the sole witnesses to her critical moment.
Slowly, Molly’s lips curled into a smile.
* * * * *
I had been watching the above scene in a recent episode of New Amsterdam when I began thinking about freedom. I imagined the countless times I had heard people say, “I didn’t have a choice” or “It was my only option” or some similar version. Molly had been living with cancer – and the difficult treatments for it – for so long that she had lost sight of her options. In her eyes, treatment was the only path forward, regardless of the damage the potential cures inflicted on her body or the decrease in her quality of life. It wasn’t until her conversation with this new doctor that she realized that there were other possibilities.
It wasn’t Molly’s fault, of course, that she only saw a part of the situation. We all move through the world with the biases and world views that were instilled in us as children, not to mention the different options and privileges afforded to members of different socioeconomic classes and people with different skin colors. As I’ve written previously, the lenses that color our vision can both enhance and hinder our perceptions of the world. A family with children with special needs might benefit from engagement with a community program, for instance, but needs to be able to know about the program in the first place in order to enroll, to say nothing of having the appropriate documents and literacy skills to go through the enrollment process. Molly’s awareness was clouded by years of hospital stays and a doctor who only encouraged her to continue fighting her cancer. Similarly, a family in crisis will have difficulty considering the benefits of connecting with community resources when they have become accustomed to fending for themselves and tackling their daily struggles alone.
As one would expect, watching Molly made me think about some of the choices that I have made in my life. How often have I behaved a certain way because I believed that a situation was out of my control when, in fact, I was just unaware of other options? Or, even worse, how many times had I not acted because I was afraid of the consequences of whichever path I would have chosen? It’s one thing to make the wrong decision – call the wrong play from the sidelines, bet on the wrong horse, pick the wrong Holy Grail – at least those examples involve active participation in directing one’s circumstances. Even if a choice doesn’t have a positive result, the hope is that a person can at least point to a logical thought process in coming to that conclusion. But the refusal to act and only responding when other people are forced to decide for you might as well come with a mane and a ticket back to Oz.
Molly’s arc in New Amsterdam was a perfect demonstration of this concept. There were only two obvious options available to Molly when the show cut to commercial: leave the pills on the table and live out her preciously few remaining days “contributing to medicine” as a research patient or take the pills and end it all immediately. We find out later that Molly went with a different option entirely but the point is that she made a choice at all. “Right” or “wrong,” Molly decided how she wanted to finish her life and she made sure that she maintained that control.
In this early portion of the Jewish new year, I’ll be looking to follow Molly’s example: I need to look for every option instead of only considering the choices that reveal themselves immediately. I need to rely on the most accurate information available to me and be purposeful in making my decisions. I need to stop procrastinating about difficult actions just because they make me uncomfortable and remember that the real discomfort comes from inaction rather than “wrong” decisions.
Perhaps you’ll choose to join me.
I should add, for the record, that I’m not here to judge the decisions people make (at least, not in this particular blog post). I’m not saying Neo was right to choose the red pill or that Homer was wrong to have the crayon re-inserted into his brain. Each of them made the choice that seemed the most sensible; whether I agree with the choice is less important than understanding the process that led to it.
Featured image by Septimiu Balica from Pixabay
Good points here. Freewill… How free is it when our access to awareness of options is often controlled by external factors we (often) don’t realize are at play. Another place where Cultivation Theory takes a toll, even when we are seeking out alternatives.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
I think I may need to have that quote framed.