I Decided to Write this Post of my Own Free Will… or Did I?

I was walking on the greenbelt by the river when I came to a side path. I didn’t have any particular destination or deadline; I was just walking. I felt like the character in Robert Frost’s The Path Not Taken, looking down each branch of the path to see what lay ahead. I thought about how all of the things that had happened in my life lead up to this moment, this decision. Right? Or left? Wide path, or narrow? River, or park? Busy, or quiet? And so on. It felt a little like making a decision, but more than that it felt like an evaluation: which outcomes did I prefer, and how strongly? I realized that countless past experiences were causing me to lean one way or the other, going all the way back to my childhood. And how much say did I really have as a child? My clothes were picked for me. My food was given to me. I was literally carried from one place to another based on the decisions of other people. Perhaps my parents always chose the left path. Or the busy one. All the while each of these experiences shaping the things I wanted. Three decades later, that same baby, now grown, stood at a fork in the path and thought, is this truly my decision? Or am I slave to my past experiences that cause my present preferences?

Free will: Is it real? Or an illusion? Are we capable of making decisions freely? Or are we in truth complex automata, driven to choose in certain ways based on the things that have happened to us, destined to run a course set for us by countless past experiences we had no control over?

It certainly feels like we have the ability to make decisions freely, rather than simply following an inevitable set of rules. This is probably where the concept of free will comes from. It feels like it’s a real thing. But is it in truth?

Philosophers have argued both ways, and both sides have on many occasions declared the case closed after presenting their reasoning, presuming their thoughts to be unassailable. Even Nietzsche, one of the West’s most brilliant thinkers, violently disagrees with himself from one book to the next. Free will is first an absurd self-contradiction, next an important route to becoming your best possible self.

Like so many philosophers before me, I get stuck in this circle. It feels like I have free will, the ability to choose freely, but I am still driven by my wants into certain decisions that it doesn’t seem reasonable to call free.

If it exists, free will is certainly a fragile and ephemeral thing.

I work pretty hard on developing myself as a human being. I regularly sit with a coach, and there are several themes that continually come up in our sessions, and I see them mirrored in spiritual philosophies from around the world.

One of these themes is the importance of having a connection to, and awareness of, my feelings. I’m a rather overly intellectual person, and it can sometimes be difficult for me to perceive what I’m feeling. So I have to practice noticing the way my emotions are tugging me, what they want me to do, being able to differentiate one want from another, and the degree of those wants.

Another theme is healthy emotional detachment. Of separating my self from my emotions. We see this in Buddhism, in Stoicism, in the asceticism of monks and nuns of many religions. The idea is that if you reduce your attachment to the world, and to things that happen, and you will suffer less. I’m much better at this one — perhaps too good, to the point where I can use it as a tactic to avoid engaging with life. So there’s a healthy balance to be struck here.

Now, let’s say we have a guru who’s an expert at both of these things. What does that look like? At its ultimate, it looks like a person who is almost totally absent of desire, who could legitimately be content whatever happened, whatever decision she made. She also uses her perfect attunement with her emotions to look at the tiny, almost invisible emotional wants tugging her in one way or another and realizes that she equally desires all potential outcomes, that no particular path is more or less attractive to her.

And then… she chooses anyway.

I think this is the path to true free will. To not be driven by the wants our experiences have programmed into us. Neither to make arbitrary decisions due to inability to discern our emotions or intentions. To choose, both fully detached and fully aware. To choose because choosing is a part of life. Only such choices as these can be entirely free, because only in these cases could we truly could have chosen any of the possible options.

And so free will becomes not something we are born into as human beings, or something that we are given as we grow older, but instead something to strive for, something that there are degrees of. As we become more centered, more healthily detached, more stoic, and as we learn how to better and better read the feelings that are there, beneath the surface calm, we earn the right to call our decisions free.

Because until we have done those things, we are in a way still slaves to our emotions, to the conditioning our culture and society and parents instilled in us. Few decisions in our lives are made completely freely, and in some people’s lives perhaps none.

I believe perfectly free decisions are something that is possible, just very difficult. I’ll be striving to do that work. What about you?

Thank you for reading. This piece is an outcome of my daily writing project. I would love to hear any thoughts you have!