Compulsion circles us round

Whether we feel forced by this or that, we are. The sheer fixity of things makes it so. Forced by this and that.

Take any area of perception or experience and you will be compelled to yield to it regardless of your feelings or experience. You cannot change it.

A key on a keyboard, a wall in the foreground, the multiplicity of events in which any element of freedom we might summon up is irrelevant.

Why then do we continue to speak of free will?

Because we are and we do. We have wills and we have choice.

What compels may rule or we may decide to tolerate it and that might involve redefining our relation to whatever it is. The compulsion is modified.

Our capacity to move, to weave, to alter our stance — these may seem small but they are badges of freedom.

Everything is real and fixity is relative, both to the movement of everything at whatever pace and to our choices.

Have you ever reflected that fantasy is a misnomer?

A fantasy is as real as real can be. All is reality.

What we have the power always to affect is how we deal with things on a scale of values that is vastly more than pleasure-pain.

We can own who we are and pay what is due to our own power to act.

Also:

What we see as forced and compelling is often exactly what sustains us.

The freedom that makes goodness possible is the small but vital center of the consciousness we bring to things.

We do what we can.

Peirce: CP 2.138 Cross-Ref:††

138. Experience is that determination of belief and cognition generally which the course of life has forced upon a man. One may lie about it; but one cannot escape the fact that some things are forced upon his cognition. There is the element of brute force, existing whether you opine it exists or not. Somebody may object that if he did not think so, he would not be forced to think so; so that it is not an instance in point. But this is a double confusion of ideas. For in the first place, that something is, even if you think otherwise, is not disproved but demonstrated if you cannot think otherwise; and in the next place, what experience forces a man to think, of course he must think. But he is not therein forced to think that it is force that makes him think so. The very opinion entertained by those who deny that there is any Truth, in the sense defined, is that it is not force, but their inward freedom which determines their experiential cognition. But this opinion is flatly contradicted by their own experience. They insist upon shutting their eyes to the element of compulsion, although it is directly experienced by them. The very fact that they can and do so shut their eyes confirms the proof that fact is independent of opinion about it.