Member-only story
Kierkegaard: The Road Is How
How do we make decisions?
“There is a generally accepted metaphor that compares life to a road. To compare life to a road can indeed be fruitful in many ways, but we must consider how life is unlike a road. In a physical sense a road is an external actuality, no matter whether anyone is walking on it or not, no matter how the individual travels on it – the road is the road. But in the spiritual sense, the road comes into existence only when we walk on it. That is, the road is how it is walked.”
I added the italics in the above quote. I feel Kierkegaard says something incredibly profound here about how to live. When I was much younger- around 23 years ago, my girlfriend became accidentally pregnant. She didn’t want to be a Mom, and after consideration she decided to carry the baby to term and put it up for adoption rather than abort. At the time she said that the decision to abort was fear-based, and the decision to give the child to folks wanting to parent was generosity-based, and she thought generosity would lead to better results.
To all appearences she was right. We gave the child away in an open adoption (the open-ness also a decision based on principle rather than strategy) and to this day we are close to our birthdaughter, Dev, who grew up with wonderful parents.
