Essay #3 Choice, the work in progress.

Choice, the work in progress.

On Nature, Trust, and What We Do With What We're Given

by

Nathan Christopher Sawatzky

Preface

I have sat in enough classrooms and shared lectures over the years to understand what happens when people feel free enough, within a space built for it, to actually share who they are and why their opinion matters. Safety is in numbers, and something changes the moment a room stops being a lecture and starts being a circle of people willing to say something true out loud, in front of each other. Scripture calls the starting point of that same willingness poverty of spirit[1], and gives it a face in a man who cannot even lift his eyes, asking only for mercy[2]. That confession only happened because it was made where someone else could hear it.

Life and Death, Set Before You

Choice and Life will never escape the Pro or the Con of either. That is not this essay. I am an advocate of both of them, I am also resistant to either of them being taken from me or the people that I love. I say that, and I choose to live it, sometimes badly.

Scripture had already staged the confrontation of choice before anyone needed a fable to dramatize it. Moses, near the end of his life, tells an entire nation standing in front of him: "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live"[3]. Not a gentle suggestion. A command to actually choose, framed in the starkest terms language allows, with the stakes reaching forward into children not yet born.

The choice is not staged privately. Moses puts both options in front of an entire assembly at once, in the open, made where it can be witnessed rather than settled alone.

Joshua inherits the same confrontation a generation later, and adds something Moses does not quite do. He makes the choice personal before he makes it collective. "Choose this day whom you will serve... but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord"[4]. He states his own choice first, plainly, then extends the same confrontation to everyone standing in front of him. Nobody is coerced. Nobody is told what to choose. He simply refuses to hide his own choice while asking everyone else to make theirs.

Choice in scripture is never staged as private or gentle. It arrives with children, generations, and entire households riding on the outcome, witnessed rather than hidden. A far newer story is about to tell essentially the same one, with a different cast, and it will feel newer than it actually is, only because the oldest and clearest version of it was standing in plain sight the entire time.

It's My Nature

Before we dive too deep, let's look at a Russian proverb.

A scorpion needs to cross a river. It cannot swim, so it asks a frog for a ride, privately, one on one, with nobody else present. The frog hesitates to help, certain the scorpion will sting it mid swim. The scorpion reasons that stinging the frog would drown them both, so why would it? The frog finds the logic sound and agrees. Halfway across, the scorpion stings it anyway. As they both go under, the frog asks why? The scorpion answers, it's my nature[5].

Why would a scorpion cross a river in the first place? Perhaps part of the story has always been missing, or incomplete. Imagine the scorpion wanted to cross simply because it had already watched another scorpion make the same crossing, and wanted nothing more than to be with its friends on the other side. The frog seemed agreeable enough to the task.

Most people know this fable and assume it is ancient. It isn't. Its earliest known appearance is a 1933 Russian novel, popularized two decades later by Orson Welles in a film monologue. It is mistaken for something older because the claim inside it feels ancient, that some natures are fixed, that wrongdoing is compulsion rather than capacity, that a creature can know exactly what its own choice will cost and make it anyway because it had no actual choice at all.

That claim is precisely the one this account has already refused to accept. A person is not born compelled toward wrongdoing. A person is born with the capacity for it, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference is the whole argument. Compulsion removes responsibility. Capacity presumes the possibility of restraint[6]. The scorpion's line is the oldest excuse in the world dressed up as biology, and it sounds convincing precisely because nobody else was there to ask a harder question before the sting landed.

The Tortoise Nobody Wrote

The Russian fable is a retelling. The older version, Persian, has a tortoise instead of a frog. The scorpion stings it anyway, out of the same claimed nature, and nothing happens. The shell holds. The tortoise survives, baffled that the scorpion would try something so obviously useless.

That is not a story about virtue. The tortoise did not choose better than the frog. It simply arrived carrying something the frog did not have, and the scorpion's fixed nature turned out to be irrelevant against it. The more interesting question neither fable asks is what happens if the tortoise and the frog arrive at the river together, and the scorpion has to negotiate with both of them in the open, rather than gambling privately with one.

A negotiation like that changes everything, not because more people means more safety, but because the exchange stops being private. The frog's fear becomes visible instead of swallowed. The tortoise's shell becomes a known fact instead of a surprise. The scorpion's actual need, to cross the river, has to be stated honestly instead of assumed hostile by default. All three could cross. Not because trust magically appears, but because nobody has to gamble blind anymore.

Push the negotiation one generation further and the same failure shows up in a different shape. Say the tortoise has already made this crossing before, and says so plainly, "I have seen this, do it this way." The frog, capable enough on its own terms but reluctant to simply take an older creature's word for it, feels the pull to prove itself instead, agrees to the scorpion's version anyway, and drowns exactly as it always does. The tortoise watches from the shore, not vindicated, just aware of what could have happened if a hard earned caution had been allowed to count for something instead of being felt as a demand to surrender the choice. That is not a story about age deserving obedience. It is a story about what one generation's impatience costs when it treats someone else's evidence as an insult to its own capability rather than information worth using.

What Choice Cost Adam

Adam spent an unmeasured stretch of time naming every living creature, and none of that naming required him to choose anything at all. He observed, he called each one by what it was, and moved to the next. Naming, on its own, asks nothing of a person but attention.

Choice arrived with another mind, the same hinge the scorpion's crossing already turned on, a second creature's shell entering the picture before anything actually happened. Once Eve existed, Adam could no longer simply observe and name. He had to reckon with a will that was not his own, running alongside his, sometimes toward the same thing and sometimes not. That is the actual cost of the mirror he had been missing, not just a witness to be known by, but a second will he now had to factor into everything he did. Naming never asked that of him. Coexisting with someone else's choice did.

Eve is the first person in this account to consciously exercise a choice apart from what she was told, reaching for something she believed was good before anyone confirmed it for her[7]. Adam's first real choice comes only after hers, and it fails immediately, blame aimed outward instead of confession aimed inward[8]. He had spent his whole existence naming things correctly. He had never once had to choose correctly, because nothing had ever asked him to before, and when the moment finally arrived, his answer was denial, not confession.

Choice, once it entered the garden, never left again. It may be the first thing God actually gave Adam, before Eve, before the fruit, before any of it, the ultimate substance a person can be handed, more consequential than anything eaten or drunk since, because everything else in this account only works because choice was already sitting underneath it, waiting to be used correctly or not.

Choice, the God of Reason

Reason traces back to the Latin ratio, a reckoning, a measurement. In its earliest sense it was meant to do math, not manufacture excuses. But in ordinary use, a reason is exactly what gets produced after a choice has already been made, to justify it. When choice becomes the thing actually worshiped, reason stops searching for what is true and starts manufacturing whatever makes the choice already wanted look justified. Reasoning as yourself and reasoning to defend yourself are not the same activity, even though they can look identical from the outside, and the difference is almost always whether the reasoning could survive being said out loud to someone else.

No other mind reading this sentence carries your exact history, your specific trials, your particular way of arriving at a conclusion. That singularity is real, and it cuts both ways. It is also exactly why an instruction given to one mind alone works differently once a second mind exists to reckon with it. Adam receives the instruction not to eat before Eve is formed at all[9]. It was never a shared command from the beginning. It became shared, from one source, the moment there were two separate minds standing in front of it instead of one. Choice was never really Adam's problem until there was another consciousness to weigh it against.

What Do You Want?

Being offered a choice is not the presence of decision making. It is the opportunity for authorship, something new entering the record because of what a person did with it, not just a selection made among things that already existed.

The same question shows up so often, from so many directions, that it stops sounding like a question and starts sounding like a riddle the species has been collectively trying to solve for as long as anyone has kept records. What do you want? It gets asked by advertisements, by every institution built to sell something, by anyone who has ever needed a person to want the thing being offered badly enough to reach for it.

Given too much undue information and too many competing demands to actually think clearly about any of them, a person gets steered, reliably, toward the path of least resistance, taught to trust what they feel as though feeling were the same thing as truth. It rarely is. Pain and consequence tend to arrive exactly at the point someone steps outside whatever parameters that path was quietly built to keep them inside. In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps[10].

Here is the paradox, stated plainly. When a person decides they themselves are the ultimate author, director, safety, and source of their own fulfillment, ownership of the self is not gained in that moment. It is lost. A foundation has to be steadier than what stands on it, or there is nothing actually holding anything up, and a self trying to be its own final ground has nothing left to be corrected by, held by, or actually possessed by. Un-anchored has never once been the same thing as free.

There may be no stronger motivator available to a person than the simple ability to choose. For a brief and entirely inconsequential moment, choosing lets a person play God, and that feeling is the actual product being sold, far more than whatever the choice was ostensibly between. Every product, every vice, every brand, every person, is competing to be better than the next one. Research on decision fatigue backs this up directly, beyond a certain number of options, more choice does not produce more freedom, it produces anxiety and a compulsive re-shopping for the right decision that never actually resolves[11]. In an economy built on exactly that mechanism, choice starts looking indistinguishable from consumerism, an endless, low grade attempt to decide our way into a satisfaction that decision alone was never built to provide.

Historically, the first thing most authoritarian consolidations move against is a free press, a pattern documented across many different regimes and eras, not tied to any single flag or moment. It should not be surprising that removing the information a choice depends on is one of the earliest and most reliable ways to remove the choice itself.

None of this is offered to take anyone's choices away. It is offered so that whatever gets chosen next gets chosen correctly, with eyes open rather than steered. In an environment built entirely to sell something, that alone feels almost foreign.

The corrective is not complicated, even if it costs everything to actually live inside. The self matters, deeply, because it carries the image of the one who made it, and that is authorship in the most literal sense available, true before a single word was ever spoken over it and true without needing language or math to prove it. Wanting is not the problem this essay has been circling. Mistaking the self for the source of what it wants is.

The Shepherd and the Ground

What Cain does with his own first real choice is not a mechanism for sin to travel down through the generations like some inherited stain, just lineage doing math. A cause, followed by an effect, followed by another cause. Nothing mystical required to explain how consequence compounds forward once it starts.

The next morning, Cain wakes to the work of two men done by one pair of hands. The flocks still need moving. The ground still needs turning. He very likely recognized, that morning if not sooner, exactly what he had removed from his own life along with his brother's.

Abel deserves more attention than the account usually gives him before his death. He is the first shepherd in scripture with anything like good intentions, and a good shepherd cannot exist without constant, attentive watching, knowing where the flock is, recognizing danger disguised as safety, staying present enough that his absence would cost a life. That is not so different from parenting, and Abel likely learned the posture from his own parents, who had already learned, the hard way, that a boundary kept someone safe from what had once burned them.

The two vocations trained two entirely different relationships to time. A flock demands reaction in real time, a threat has to be answered the moment it appears or the loss is immediate. A field allows distance, plant, wait, harvest, an entire season to sit with a disappointment before anything has to be done about it. Cain, trained by a slower clock, meets a single moment of rejection with something immediate and irreversible. Abel's whole vocation, by contrast, had already trained him toward sustained watchfulness long before either of them ever brought an offering.

Every human iteration since, pastor, teacher, doctor, counselor, is some version of the same willful influence, someone other people allow to shape them. That influence is not automatically manipulation, and the distinction matters. Influence becomes manipulation the moment it starts serving the one doing the influencing instead of the one receiving it, or the moment it hides its actual aim. A shepherd who is transparent about what he wants for the flock, and wants it for the flock's own sake, is not manipulating anything. He is doing the one thing Cain refused to do with the choice in front of him, putting someone else's good ahead of his own account of what he was owed.

There is a detail in the two brothers' own names, and it is not invented, it is sitting in the Hebrew itself. Cain, Qayin, comes directly from qanah, to acquire or possess, the word Eve herself uses at his birth, "I have gotten a man." Abel, Hevel, means breath, vapor, the same word Ecclesiastes uses for vanity of vanities, something too fleeting to ever be held onto[12]. The acquirer kills the vapor, wanting to possess something that was never substantial enough to be possessed to begin with, and ends up with nothing lasting himself, cursed to wander a field he can no longer even trust to answer him. The things a person owns end up owning them[13], and Cain wanted to own a regard that was never his to acquire in the first place.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely[14], unless there is nothing with any legitimate claim to object to it. Cain had no such exemption. He held total, unwitnessed power over one field and one brother for exactly the length of one act, and something with every right to object, a life that was never his to take, was standing right in front of him when he used it.

During all of those lectures, sermons, and even the meetings people go to when they are trying to actually get better, one word is rarely spoken out loud. It is a harsh word, with even harsher consequences, and it stays hard to place, because pride, fear, and self preservation all play into it enough to make it look like something else. Narcissism, stripped down to its actual mechanism, is the removal of choice, not always as violently as Cain removed it, but the shape is identical, another person's will treated as an obstacle to be managed rather than a will to be reckoned with.

This is different from something more common and far less malicious. Most people who pass forward misguided principles or unresolved pain are not doing this. That kind of wound is nearly inevitable wherever a person carries the weight of raising another person forward, hardship leaving its mark whether anyone intended it to or not, the blind leading the blind, both of them still arriving, eventually, at the same river of understanding.

Narcissism is not that. It is a preconceived plan, cooperation and coercion built specifically to produce a result that serves one person's priorities regardless of who the other person actually is. It is not blind. It is intended. Cain's murder is simply the final, complete version of what every smaller act of manipulation is already attempting in private, in miniature.

Go back to the river one more time. A scorpion had already failed against the tortoise's shell, so it started swimming back with new understanding of the nature of scorpions. It arrived just in time to warn the frog before that same nature gets to try again. The frog does not get spared the choice. It only gets a chance the tortoise itself never had, someone already trying to reach it before the sting lands. Whether that is enough is the only question left.

The Age We Chose

A child is not born with fear built in. A child trusts because everything they need has, so far, simply been provided, and there has been no reason yet to reckon with the world any other way. Fear, in the specifically human sense, is not manufactured out of nothing. It arrives through what actually happened to a person, often inherited before it is even understood, a parent's own unresolved fear passed down not as instruction but as atmosphere, privately, without ever being named out loud long enough for anyone to correct it.

Society has to pick an age somewhere, and eighteen is as reasonable a line as any, old enough to have finished the basic architecture of formal schooling, old enough that a body already capable of reproducing needs no further explanation for why it eventually will. That part is not philosophy. It is basic existence with consequences attached, and one of those consequences is simply called adulthood, arriving whether or not a person has actually finished reckoning with whatever fear, pride, or unearned defense mechanism got handed to them somewhere along the way.

The animal kingdom manages this without a single lesson ever being taught. A wildebeest hesitates at a river where crocodiles wait, not because a classroom explained the danger, but because fear, once real, does not require instruction to be understood. What gets lost in human development, more often than not, is not the fear itself. It is the chance to actually examine where it came from, out loud, with someone else present, before being asked to make an adult's choices with a child's unexamined defenses still fully intact.

The Bridge, Not Another Voice

Everything in this account, up to this point, has worked the same way. A fable pulled apart, a river crossed and re-crossed in imagination, a name traced back to its Hebrew root, evidence gathered, and reason asked to do something with it afterward. That is inspiration, breath moving through creation and being noticed, a pattern observed and reasoned toward a conclusion. It is not nothing. Every chapter here has depended on it.

Jesus did not arrive as another pattern to be reasoned toward. He is not a better fable, a sharper analogy, one more workshop to draw a lesson from. He is the bridge itself, standing between God and man rather than pointing toward one from a distance, which makes him categorically different from every other example in this account. Not inspiration. Revelation. Not a voice asking us to reason our way toward a conclusion about God, but God's own conclusion, arrived in a body, becoming the actual litmus test the human equation to any moral argument now has to pass through rather than around.

His message never needed an elaborate parable to be understood, though he used plenty. Character. Leadership through service. Giving of what you have. Honest work. Putting someone else's need ahead of your own account of what you were owed. It is, at bottom, fairly simple math. Peter once asked how many times he was required to forgive someone, expecting a number he could count to and be done with. Jesus answered seventy times seven[15], a number large enough to stop being a number at all and start being a posture instead, forgiveness that keeps adding itself back up every time the count runs out.

The reason the math never quite adds up on its own is the same reason this whole account keeps landing back where it started. Nobody actually had a choice in the saving to begin with. The only choice on offer was ever what to do once it had already been given.

Final Thoughts

The oldest version of every one of these stories eventually arrives at the same question, whichever tradition tells it. Not why is it important for me to get across the river safely. Why is it important for you to get across the river safely. Do nothing out of selfish ambition, in humility value others above yourselves[16]. That is not a new instruction. It is the same one every serious tradition for centuries has been built on top of, in different language, pointed at the same target.

Of the people, by the people, for the people never needed a justification. It needed perspective, the same thing three animals at a river need before any of them can actually cross safely together. This was never a contest of willpower. It is a conflict of empathy, and empathy loses the moment a person's own choice starts getting questioned loudly enough, in front of enough others, that they can no longer trust their own reckoning of it. Bullies know exactly when that has happened. It is the only moment they ever actually need. Brand ownership, examined honestly, is often the same gang warfare wearing the mask of free choice.

Neither Adam nor Eve had ever actually experienced restriction before that single instruction. Not really. Everything up to that point had simply been given. Eve received the command secondhand, retold by someone else, a rule about a tree becoming, somewhere along the way, a rule about not even touching it[17]. Adam had heard it directly, from the source itself, and still failed the moment his own choice was finally asked of him. Neither of them had ever heard the word no cost anything before that day. The first failure in this record was not defiance against a clear and well understood boundary. It was two people encountering the actual weight of a boundary for the very first time, with nothing in either of their histories to have prepared them for what it would cost.

A note on how to actually hold everything above this line. By now, Adam and Eve, a wildebeest at a river, and even a scorpion invented by a Russian novelist have all passed through the same hands, mine, and every one of them has picked up some interpretation and some reference along the way that the original never quite claimed for itself. One reading is exactly that, a reading, not a claim. Eve is formed from a rib, the bone that guards the heart and the lungs in the same breath[18]. Read as more than anatomy, she arrives built for defense before she ever speaks a word. Water opens the whole account this essay's companion piece already traced, hovering over the earth before anything else exists, and two people, breathed into, are formed not long after. That pairing is a pattern I notice more than a claim I can prove from the text itself, mine to notice, not scripture's to confirm. Take all of it, this line included, with a grain of salt. Not a grain of sand. Salt dissolves and changes what it touches without needing to be seen doing it. Sand just sits there until something else does the work of turning it into glass.

Love is a choice, and it never stops being one. It starts with recognizing that someone else's opportunity to choose matters more than wherever your own blind want was headed. It continues by admitting, honestly and repeatedly, that people still choose selfishly anyway, sometimes even after knowing better. Human attempts at love fail. Often. The failure was never the disqualifying part. Choosing again, after it, still is.

A work in progress,

-Nate

-References and footnotes

1. Matthew 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

2. Luke 18:13, the tax collector "would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'"

3. Deuteronomy 30:19, "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live."

4. Joshua 24:15, "Choose this day whom you will serve... But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord."

5. The Scorpion and the Frog first appears in Lev Nitoburg's 1933 Russian novel The German Quarter, and was popularized in the English-speaking world through Orson Welles's 1955 film Mr. Arkadin. It is a retelling of an older Persian fable, The Scorpion and the Tortoise.

6. Genesis 4:7, "sin is crouching at your door; its desire is for you, but you must rule over it."

7. Genesis 3:6. Eve takes the fruit and eats it, then gives some to Adam, who eats it as well.

8. Genesis 3:12. "The man said, 'The woman you put here with me, she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.'"

9. Genesis 2:16-17, "The Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.'" Given to Adam alone, before Eve is formed.

10. Proverbs 16:9, "In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps."

11. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004), on decision fatigue and the anxiety produced by an excess of options.

12. Cain (Qayin) derives from qanah, "to acquire, to possess" (Genesis 4:1, "I have gotten a man"). Abel (Hevel) means "breath" or "vapor," the same word used throughout Ecclesiastes for "vanity of vanities."

13. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996), spoken by Tyler Durden in the 1999 film adaptation: "The things you own end up owning you."

14. Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton (1887): "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

15. Matthew 18:21-22, "Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?' Jesus answered, 'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times,'" traditionally rendered "seventy times seven."

16. Philippians 2:3, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves."

17. Genesis 3:2-3. Eve tells the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" The prohibition on touching the tree does not appear in God's original instruction to Adam in Genesis 2:16-17.

18. Genesis 2:21-22, "the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man."