What Happens When We Choose
The quiet weight of freedom, loss, and love.
Some choices are loud. Others come like a whisper.
You don’t always realize you’ve made one until much later—when the consequences show up, unexpected, and stay.
We like to think of freedom as a gift. And it is. But it also demands something from us. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it a kind of curse: we are free to choose, but that means we are also responsible. For everything that follows.
The Invisible Fork in the Road
Most of the time, choosing doesn’t look like a dramatic moment. It looks like a quiet conversation. A decision at work. A deep breath before saying yes—or no. It looks like love, in small, daily acts.
But behind each choice is a cost. Sometimes it’s obvious. Other times, it takes months or years to understand what we gave up. There’s always a version of life we don’t live. And that version doesn’t vanish. It stays with us, as a question: What if?
Choosing with No Guarantees
Some people carry this weight in silence. Like a mother who gave everything she had to raise someone she loved more than herself. She made choice after choice—some joyful, some impossible—without knowing what the outcome would be. She gave her body, her time, her sleep, her whole self. And then, one day, what she loved most was gone.
Not because she failed.
Not because she chose wrong.
But because life is unfair in ways we can’t prepare for.
Still, if you asked her, she’d probably say she’d do it all again. Because love, real love, is always a choice. Even when it hurts.
The Leap into the Unknown
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard writes about Abraham. Not the version from Sunday school—the real one. A man walking up a mountain, unsure of what will happen. All he has is faith. No answers. No comfort. Just the decision to go forward, even if it means breaking his own heart.
That kind of choice isn’t logical. It’s human. It’s what we do when we love something enough to risk everything.
The Real Cost of Not Choosing
The hardest truth?
Not choosing doesn’t save us. It only delays the cost. It turns into regret, into numbness, into a life that slowly closes in. It might feel safer, but it’s not. Over time, indecision can hollow us out more than a bad decision ever could.
What matters isn’t always making the “right” choice. That’s impossible to guarantee. What matters is choosing with truth. With care. With love. Even when it’s terrifying. Especially then.
What About You?
Are you standing in front of a choice right now?
Maybe it’s small. Maybe it’s life-changing.
Either way, know this: it’s okay to feel scared. But don’t let that stop you.
What happens when we choose is that we start becoming who we are meant to be.
One decision at a time.