It is a question of choice

It is a question of choice

Imagine this: Whole of the Earth is about to be flooded (or as Douglas Adams envisaged the earth is about to be demolished to make way for the intergalactic highway!!) and the rescue spaceship has arrived to transport you to another planet. You are allowed to take just one of your possesions with you - What would you take? You are allowed to take one person along. Who would you choose?
Questions like this are so handy to liven up a party or a rainy afternoon. Some of the replies are revealing, some sentimental, and some plain funny as you can always laugh about a hypothetical situation.
In reality,the process of life itself is nothing but a series of choices and living out their results and there is nothing "hypothetical" about it. We make them every step of the way, all the way. Some are conscious choices and others reflexive rooted in social and biological conditioning.And sometimes we are so blinded by this conditioning that we do not even see the choices and we let our situation take control and just drift along and say "I did not have a choice". But the fact is that there is never a situation without a choice in this life. There may be two equally difficult choices (like the proverbial frying pan and the fire) but there is always a choice.

There are moments like the question I started with when you are faced with such a limited choice that it seems like no choice at all. Just imagine you are being offered the choice to jump on a spaceboat and escape to safety, to an alien place leaving everything that has defined your life so far and without the knowledge of what awaits you there. Can you choose one , just one thing or person to take along which would make you feel comfortable "out there"?

And yet in the course of our lives, we make choices of equal significance on which our very survival and the course of our life depends, without even knowing that they are "life defining".We have been sent here with a definite deadline ( pun unintended), the only certainty being "death." Yet we do not live with with the urgency that it demands not do we make our choices with the seriousness they deserve. Some of us come here,chill out,have a party and leave.We say " why take life so seriously? Enjoy while it lasts for in the long run we are all dead!". This is still a "choice" we have made. Others grope around undecided and leave. Yet others live out choices made for them by some one else.And then there are those few, who live every moment with the seriousness and significance it deserves. I do not know if consumption decides the difference between living and existing or consciousness but I believe there is no single "good" or "correct" way that someone else can dictate - It all finally boils down to one's own choice. And therein lies the whole value of life.

Abhilash has written a brilliant post on a related issue here.
Ram,as I write this I am smiling in anticipation of your reaction which is bound to raise related issues and a lively debate as you have always done in the past on questions relating to philosophy and politics.

Anyway coming back to the original question, my choice would be that I'd refuse to hop on to that boat. I have no desire to start my life anywhere else that this wonderful earth leaving behind everyone who form my "life" for me. I shall perish with everything that goes with this earth.