Consciousness in Decision-Making
An old man was walking along a beach after a terrible storm and found the shore covered in thousands of stranded starfish. As he walked, he noticed a young child in the distance who was frantically picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. The man approached the child and said, "There are miles of beach and thousands of starfish. You can't possibly save them all. What you are doing won't make a difference!" The child listened politely, bent down, and picked up another starfish. Tossing it safely past the breaking waves, the child looked up at the man and replied: "It made a difference to that one."
Sometimes, the work can feel enormous. But no effort is too small—every starfish counts. Remember that every act matters, even those that seemingly make no dent. A marathon is run, of course, one step at a time.
Our actions and decisions matter. What we choose matters. We can think of the Butterfly Effect, or the straw that broke the camel's back, or even the Tipping Point. Call it what you will, but this concept shows up again and again--small acts can have large impacts.
Embodying this concept itself can feel trivial. Yet realizing the potency of your decisions can imbue your life with meaning and purpose. We have agency, and that agency has weight. We live in a large world, floating through an enormous solar system, within a vast universe. And ultimately, none of it really matters. Except it does, doesn't it? It matters on the micro scale. It matters today, right here, right now. It matters to you, and to me, and to the lives we touch around us.
It's so easy to go through life on auto-pilot. In our default mode. Letting our consciousness run amock, letting our thoughts be the mere product of the world around us. David Foster Wallace, in his commencement speech This is Water, warns against the dangers of allowing this to happen. Of course, this is how most people live. Thoughts come, thoughts go. Annoyances arise, and so we get annoyed. Whether that's in traffic, or at the grocery store, or in line at the DMV. And that's fine. Unless you want to control your consciousness rather than be controlled by it. You get to choose what to think about. You can choose to believe better, to do better. You can drive with rage through rush hour bumper to bumper traffic, or you might ask how you yourself are complicit in contributing to the conditions around you. After all, you are traffic. It is this sort of attentive, intentional thinking that will give your life purpose--not because it's easy, but because you have chosen to.
Just as it's easy to see a shore full of thousands of stranded starfish and keep walking, so too is it easy to fall into a default way of life. You don't have to go above and beyond. But you can choose to. You can choose to strive, to search for meaning, to give meaning where others see drudgery. The point is not necessarily to take on life's shortcomings and insist they are silver-lined opportunities, but rather, the point is to be an active participant in choosing. Good or bad, be the conscious decision-maker.
Through meditation, we observe the mind. We sit, we listen, we get distracted, we come back. And in this process, we can note: ah, thinking. Or ah, feeling. And it turns out that we do have some say over the channels our minds tune into--like fresh snow filling in the grooves of skiers past, we can fill in the thought patterns that have for so long pulled us down. We can chart new paths, new ways of thinking--ways more aligned with our higher selves.
Like anything, this practice won't be perfect. There will be days or even weeks when we don't have it in us to choose. But that choice is always there, waiting patiently like a starfish in the sand, yearning for its saltwater home.