choose

A moment before you go further.

We vastly overestimate the importance of our time and how much we have of it and how we spend it, but, that aside and all that may follow, I do not want to be accused of wasting yours; overvalued and ostensibly not nearly as important as you want to believe it is; your time spent here with me; I want that to be good.

I want it to be of value.

That much said I further stipulate that if you are looking or seeking or hunting up a string of language that will positively affirm the positively affirming language that you employ to positively affirm your life choices, stop.

Read no further.

For that matter; fuck off.

On the other hand if you are up for a solid whine and ponder that lacks any firm resolution at its end then, by all means, stay, pull up a seat, pour yourself a glass.

All of this comes by way of wanting to kick around a text I got from a girlfriend. Not an acquaintance or a coworker friend-lite sort of person; a real, honest, we’ve been drunk together enough times that we’ve both arrived at sobriety as a pretty good solution to all that drunkenness, kind of friend.

The text came in response to one I sent her- a little whiney thing I had strung together about work and the crazy people contained therein. The kind of text we send to friends when we need to offload a bit about work and the crazy people contained therein. And she responded in the appropriate way, threw in a few LOLs to keep it properly texty and light, but then ended the whole thing with the following four words:

Choose to be joyful.

Choose to be joyful. I stared at those words for a good two minutes and then put my phone down and realized that there was no way I could respond how I wanted to while maintaining the friendship. Sending back- ok- if you choose to go fuck yourself I’ll choose to be joyful, remains a patently absurd way to nurture and feed a good relationship even if it’s all meant and said with love.

I’ve spent more time than I care to admit mulling over why those four words bothered me so much. I imagine it’s partly because the phrase smells and feels too much like ending a text with; What would Jesus do, which is fine if you’re religious or even remotely spiritual, which is fine for every single person out there who really wonders; What WOULD Jesus do when dealing with life.

Which is fine if the sentiment is being passed between people who don’t really know each other- and perhaps that’s not really fine, but at least it’s not so incredibly off putting as it would be between good friends- close friends- friends who know each other well enough to know that, hey, maybe one of them really doesn’t think about what Jesus would do at any of life’s interesting junctions. Maybe one of them is busy trying to figure out what they would do and not terribly concerned with the choices of a man who’s been dead long enough that his choices might not be the same given the vast and unpredictably strange way the world has altered since he was making his choices.

But I digress.

Choose to be joyful. It’s easy to see that I equate that loop of verbiage with religion and with all the arrogance that religion, out of bleak necessity, brings to the table.

Dissect the phrase, parse it out however you want but, still, there’s no way to scrape the arrogance off of it. Command form verbs are like that. They presume to tell you what to do and what is presumption if not arrogance flounced up in a party dress.

And religion is really not much more than a whole lot of command form verbs ordering you about, telling you how to think, what to eat, who to fuck, how to kill; telling you what to choose.

Say, like, telling you to Choose to be joyful.

And before a whole lot of you try to crawl up my ass and chew out my insides about religion and its beauty, just stop. Religion is not faith. Religion is not belief. Religion is the corporatization of faith and belief. It’s a branding of the unfathomable. A commercialization of the mysteries of spirit and soul for the sake of better spreading around all those command form verbs and keeping said mysteries firmly in hand and under control.

The thing about the friend and the text and the order to choose joyfulness comes down to this; it’s about her religion. It’s about the way she has managed to accept her life, accept her opportunities, accept the not always pleasant shift time has presented. It’s about the coopting of yoga, mindfulness, meditation, juicing, fasting, cleansing, and/or aligning one’s chakras as the religion of the irreligious. It’s about this not being the first time she’s told me or, better put, ordered me to choose some sort of fuckwit positive attitude toward life.

She calls it being spiritual.

I call it being condescending.

Because at its heart, like all religions, this spirituality presumes that it has something to tell me that I haven’t the wherewithal to figure out on my own, that it has a cognition of life that I just can’t discern without it’s particular form of guidance and regulation and practice, that I just need to get on board because; OMG, how much better my life will be if I just choose to listen and do. Choose to cooperate. Choose to follow on this path. Choose to heed.

Because like religion it’s ceased to have the beauty of art, which, as we all know too well, is in the eye of the beholder. Instead it has a ritual to be followed. A practice to be maintained. A dominion that offers a way through the door to happiness.

If only I would fucking choose to walk that way.

As for that text and that friend. I choose to believe that she says and does all things out of love and kindness no matter how misguided or insulting. I choose to believe that she is on the edge of a thing that may just be saving her life and like so many of us in those incredibly sharp and shiny moments when we have discovered one thing that helps, that lifts up, that buoys us through the bullshit of our existence we presume it will do the same for everyone around us. We presume everyone will get the same results. We presume in a sort of evangelical, crusading sort of way.

We presume because we want it to be so. We want to be the hero for everyone else’s lives as well as our own because, how cool would that be? How fucking incredibly awesome if we could all just give away the magic that worked for us. If we could all just say ‘What Would Jesus Do’ or ‘Choose to be joyful’ and have those words be like fairy dust and magic for every life they manage to reach.

Because even I think it would be the best thing ever if I could make all the people of the world choose to love and care for kittens and puppies, while maintaining a properly deceptive cynical grimace on their face, while striving to create laughter out of sordid, bloody, shitty, impoverished, starving reality, while knowing enough to know that none of us know what’s really right, or good, or magic but that we are going to keep right on trying to figure it out, all while pretty much creating world peace, racial harmony, enacting gun control and solving the global climate crisis.

And now I’m going to choose to end this just as I promised, without firm resolution because a solid shrug is the best I have to offer the world of command form verbs and the religion of language they foist upon any of us.

This I choose.