Choosing Our Paths

One of the gifts I got for Christmas this year was Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss. I like this book because it's inspiring, yet surprisingly realistic, and it covers one of my favorite aspects of the gospel: agency.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
...
You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

I love that we have the freedom to choose what path we follow, and I love the implication of being highly selective in which paths we choose. If a particular path doesn't seem so great, we can choose another path. We have the freedom to decide where we go, so where we end up is mostly up to us.

Granted, there are also forces outside of our control that can affect us. We don't choose our starting point, for example, and there are aspects we can't choose about the road ahead of us. Sometimes, our only options are bad ones, and we have to try to choose the least-bad one, but barring situations like that, we often have the freedom to choose between multiple good options, and we get to try to find the best one. And while there will always be forces outside our control, there are also always forces within our control, like our own decisions. We can make up our minds to do something, and even if we try and fail and learn that we lack the power to do it, our decision still matters. In the end, we'll be judged by our choices as much as by the consequences of our choices. If we try and fail, we still tried.

So, ultimately, our decisions matter, and those decisions are entirely up to us. There are lots of paths laid out before us, some better than others, and it's entirely up to us to decide which paths we choose to follow.