Could you imagine if that was how the Universe worked? That you were given a menu on your fourteenth birthday and asked to compile your future from the choices – picking a major theme for yourself – work, mate, home – and it simply became as you chose?

Even if it was known to us, even if it we knew life would play out exactly as we wanted, I can imagine that we would still find ways to sabotage it. Because that’s the human element isn’t it? Choice. Choice is the great gift for humanity from our ultimate source. Choice is a brick that we can use to build a castle for ourselves. Or a fortress.

Back to the conversation that derails the supposed futures we want to build for ourselves. That’s a choice too right; we chose to talk ourselves out of doing seemingly simple and innocuous things that could put us on these great human paths? I understand that I make these choices out of habit or for fucked up reasons (like fear of the accountability to the world actual success might carry with it) but why does knowing that not stop me at the time?

But am I making a choice or simply avoiding a choice? Can a choice be to not do something, to not act? Isn’t choice really about positive action?

For me, the choices (or avoidance of choice) I have been making about writing (or the food for that matter) bad choices lead to guilt. Guilt paralyzes creativity, kills the ability to believe that my future is interwoven with these noble and romantic occupation. My choices are deliberate stalls that go against what I say I want for myself.

I want to slim down – for a dozen reasons not the least of what it would do for my cycling and my ability to pass a mirror and not feel slightly ashamed that doing better with my body is not such a great accomplishment and aren’t I smarter than my outcome after al? Every day, I think out loud that the path to trimming down is relatively simple; modify my eating (type of foods and amount of food) yet everyday I choose the same sweet or heavy foods the fattest Americans choose for themselves.

Just the same, it hurts me to flip through the directory on my computer’s hard drive where I keep the fiction I have written in my life. There are two of the three novels there (the third, actually the first, exists on paper only and I gave it to my wife and have no idea where she keeps it presently). There are short stories there. There are outlines and beginnings of novels and fractions of poems. It’s a great collection of unfinished restarts of a pursuit that seems likely never to be finished.

How sad and stupid is that.

So why not make the choices that would achieve the goals I carry in the back of my mind and refuse to let go in the face of all evidence that I am an unworthy steward; to write every day? Why not start each morning with fruit and end with vegetables and some time stringing together sentences?

I could stare at this cursor all day and not come up with an answer that is not total bullshit.

Should I not try any more because the odds are hugely stacked against me ever turning out something that would be published? Bah! I see complete and total but published crap all the time; even catch my wife reading some horribly written yet legitimately produced novels (and I’m not just saying that from the bitter space of one who has not spitting on the efforts of one who has).

Should I not try because there’s little chance I could turn out work as good or as popular as the stuff I admire most – the John Sandford novels that get me through the numb routine of airline travel? Surely that’s too much too ask of myself. Calling my cycling a failure and unworthy of effort because at forty and with comparatively limited cardiovascular capacity I have not yet chased this year’s version of Lance Armstrong up a European col would be silly and childish delusion, then isn’t making the same comparison in writing novels an equal egotistical masturbation?

Should I not try because I don’t have the time? I know, I can even hear you laughing at that one. How much time in life is freely given to our friends in the television business? How much time allocated to the enterprise of work in the name of making a living for my family is actually frittered on tasks and distractions as useful to me and my enterprise as ass scratching?

So it really boils back down to choice, to making a choice to overwhelm the self-defeating conversation at the top of this piece. I’m not talking about whipping myself into a frenzy of positive affirmation and blind faith that if I just work, I will achieve that superstardom, that fame and fortune that corrupts the edges of my reason for doing the work. I understand that one of my motivations for writing is recognition on any level beyond myself and that need is a sickness in and of itself but the choice it to override the self-doubt that questioning my motivation always brings (the beginning of the spiral). But what I choose for myself is that since I am going to occupy twenty four hours of every day I have left in this existence doing something with the body and mind I have at my disposal, I will simply rotate in writing from now on.

What possible harm could come?