I chose this

You ever get an idea in your head that seems so familiar that you know you heard it somewhere before, but you can’t place it? I had that feeling driving to work this morning. I can’t even tell you the train of thoughts that lead to the one I arrived at. It might be that the thought simply popped into my head the way errant thoughts sometimes do. I was driving in my Jeep with the radio on. I was listening to the NPR newscaster discussing the events in Egypt. It was warm this morning, or at least, warmer than it has been in a while and I was trying to decide whether or not to roll down the windows, because I was about to get on the freeway and couldn’t decide if I simply wanted a bit of fresh air or the torrent of fresh air that driving with the windows down at seventy miles an hour brings. Anyway there I was, sitting in my car, I think I was approaching a red light, when this stray thought wandered through the window of my mind. It was so tentative, so fragile, like the smell of apple pie coming from the neighbor’s kitchen, or the scent of spring borne on seasonal breeze, that at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it. “What” I wondered, “If in the moments before birth, our souls choose the life we wanted to live?”

There are many religions that talk about the souls experience before life. The Greeks have the reincarnated soul pass across the river Lethe and so forget everything the soul knew in the life before. The Bardo Thodol teaches that once awareness is freed from the body after death it traverses through a series of spiritual tests before it reenters the world in the form of a new birth. I don’t know about any of that stuff. I don’t know if we are born once and live the life we are given, or if we have an immortal soul that that entered and reentered the world for countless eons, in and out of life after life through the creation of universe after universe. For me none of that really matters. All I have is now. But I wonder. Did I choose now? I mean really choose this now, in a time and a place so different from this that words like time and place have no meaning. Did I, standing on the precipice, look out over the whole course of my life, and, like a contestant at a carnival booth, did I reach down into the water and pick this life knowing all that I knew then, that I would have to go through all that I know now?

Now, I don’t know if I read this somewhere, in the Upanishads, for instance, or in the Gita. I probably did, or something just like it. But for that moment in my car, listening to the radio, and feeling the wind on my face, I had this thought and what is more I was so sure of it, so sure that it was true, that I believed it. Probably because that thought, the thought that my life wasn’t the product of God or the Universe or any other force but was in fact the by-product of a choice that I made. Of all the countless lives I could have chosen, I chose this one, because there was something, many things, that this life had to offer that I needed to learn. There is no force outside of myself “doing this” to me, or inflicting this life upon me. Like a college freshman standing in front of an admissions office with a handbook full of electives, this is the litany of courses I chose for myself. Now all that's left is to figure out what to do with it.