No One Choosing

An exploration of choice

It began with the apple.

She thought she was choosing. Weighing, considering, reaching. But when she slowed down enough, it was startlingly clear—the hand had already moved before the story of choice arrived. The chooser was late to its own party.

That single apple shook something loose.

The Small Decisions

She tested it in smaller ways first. Tea or coffee? Socks or bare feet? The same sequence repeated itself: thought offered options, the body moved, and then the mind leapt in afterward to take credit.

I chose the tea.
But the cup was already filled.

I decided to wear socks.
But they were already on her feet.

She laughed at the absurdity of it. Not in a mocking way, but like someone finally catching the punchline of a joke told a thousand times.

The Larger Ones

But what about the bigger decisions? The kind that felt weighty, where the illusion of control carried more seriousness?

She remembered moving to the mountains. Friends had asked her, “Why did you decide to leave the city?”

She had always answered with tidy explanations: the quiet, the cleaner air, the longing for space. But looking back now, those reasons felt like footnotes written after the book was already finished.

There had been no decision point she could find. One day, she saw a cabin listing online. The next, she found herself dialing the number. Weeks later, boxes were in the car. Looking closely, she couldn’t find a moment where she had chosen. The whole thing had simply… happened.

Watching More Closely

It became a daily experiment. She carried the inquiry like a lantern, illuminating each crossroads.

Should she call her sister? The thought arose. The phone was in her hand. The number was already ringing before she could even decide if it was the “right time.”

Should she go for a walk? Before the weighing of pros and cons, her shoes were laced. The door was already open.

Each time, the realization repeated: the sense of control was nothing but a story pasted onto what had already unfolded.

The Relief

She expected this would make her anxious—that realizing there was no one behind the wheel would feel like chaos. But the opposite arrived.

The weight of responsibility, of having to choose correctly, to steer carefully, to not “mess up”—all of it began to dissolve. Decisions were still happening. Life still unfolded. But it wasn’t her burden to carry.

It was like discovering the river had been carrying her raft the whole time, while she had been pretending to paddle furiously. She could still move her arms in the water if they wanted, but even that was just another current, another movement not authored by a self.

The Last Twitch

And yet, sometimes, a reflex appeared. A thought like a twitch: So what should I do with this understanding? How do I live now?

For a while, it felt urgent, almost like panic—I need to apply this, to integrate it, to use it somehow.

But when she looked closely, there was nothing behind it. Just a phantom firing in the nervous system, the echo of a lifetime of seeking. Like a limb still tingling after it’s gone.

That last twitch of the seeker came and went. She let it. There was no need to cut it off, no need to resolve it.

The Ordinary

What remained was simple. The apple eaten. The walk walked. The phone call made. The mountain air breathed in.

No chooser. No controller.
Just this moment, unfolding.

And for the first time, perhaps ever, she felt the ordinariness of it all was enough.

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