Now here’s a choice our forefathers never faced:Â to drink water from a bottle or from the tap.
It would have seemed to them an absurd choice since buying water in a bottle would have been an absurd idea. I recall longing for and finally purchasing a military canteen. The canteen was a metal container shaped like a saucer, covered with heavy canvass.
The legislature in Maine is set to consider whether plastic water bottles will be allowed in state offices, buildings, and schools. Green concerns make up the most of the anti-bottle beliefs, while concession revenues, water safety, and convenience inform the pro-bottle forces.
Such a choice – to bottle or not to bottle.
There are some things you simply can’t choose. It’s too late, you weren’t born that way, you haven’t the right genes, it flies in the face of physics, or your peek has passed. It’s impossible, and not in the sense of the impossible dream. Ain’t gonna happen. No choice.
For instance, you can’t choose to be a Mainer. Nope. No way. If you are not already a Mainer, you can’t choose it. By the same token, if you are a Mainer, you can’t not be one.
Mainers came here sometime before 1750, had children, whose children had children, who had children, and so forth, until it comes to you, if you are a Mainer. You can move here from somewhere else, at which point you are considered from away, a back to the lander, a tourist, or a summah person. But you ain’t never gonna be a Maineah.
You had to choose to be a Mainer before 1750.
And as they say in Maine, yah can’t get theah from heah.
To be, or not to be, that is the choice.
We wish that were true, and in some ways it is the essential existential question; but choosing isn’t what we usually do. More often than not, we live in the comfort of not-choosing. Small choices make us happy – do I choose the Italian roast this morning or the breakfast blend? Do I have oatmeal or do I have toast? Over easy or scrambled? Do I buy a car or a truck? Do I go for the high mileage or comfort?
Pliers or crescent wrench, your choice, $9.95!
Really?
The bigger things, who we love, where we live, what job we take, what religion we ascribe to, what health status we embark upon, what language we speak, what family we are born to, what air we breath … do we really have the choices we think we do? We like to think we have choice, but what may seem like choice may be rationalization, backfilling, and story telling. It’s only a choice after you’ve made it, after you’ve had a chance to invent the options and measure the outcomes. To be a choice, there must be options weighed.
What choice do we really have?
That is the question.
When did “choice” become a thing? Of course I want to have choices – to choose where I live, what car I buy, what college I go to. I want to choose whom I love. Making choices is what humans do. Making choices defines being human.
But choice as an ideology? Can we have choice for choice’s sake? Are we entitled to choice, or do we make choices possible? We are embedded in the culture that we learned, the family, the language, the ways, the diet, religion, the economy, and so forth. We didn’t have a choice in it; we were born to it and raised in it. How then, are we entitled to choice?
The way we live our lives gives us the chance to choose, and we deal with the consequences of choosing. That is how we learn, or fail to learn. That is how we grow, or fail to grow.
Something is fishy with this notion of choice.
This morning the sun rose bright and sassy over Maranacook Lake, reminding me that in mid-February the days grow longer quickly, marked by bright sun early and a longer afternoon. We have today off for Presidents’ Day, an important holiday in the Northeast. In the midwest it was noted, but not deemed worthy of a day off. Teachers put George Washington on bulletin boards instead. In Maine, we give the kids the day off. Another reason to like this state.
I bought a set of fly tying instruments and a pile of feathers and yarn. April 1 is opening day on most streams and lakes in Maine for trout. Sometime between now and then – perhaps even today – an egg sucking leach or two will be created.
The loggers are here at the Winthrop place.
First came a pickup truck that plowed out a big part of the meadow next to the forest. A skidder arrived a week later with some logging maw attached to the front of it and chains on the big-lugged tractor tires. Then the plowed yard suddenly filled with all manner of machinery for cutting, skinning, and stacking logs. Now there is a big mess of branches, stacks of logs, several parked machines, and the pervasive smell of cut trees.
It is a veritable massacre of trees back there behind the house, One day soon I shall walk up there to see what has happened and breathe in the sharp smell of sap and wood and sawdust, where I sat in the woods and waited for deer just a few months ago.