Fundamental Choices of LIFE

Kiaya Nickens

Mr. Sanchez

Christian in the World – p.8

September 17, 2012

Kenyon Commencement Address:

David Foster Wallace

One common similarity that all human beings are born with is the choice of free will. In David Foster Wallace’s commencement address one of the first topics he mentions that life consist of fundamental choices that lie entirely within the human person and allows them to engage the world differently. Which in other words is the aspect of having free will. We make choices every day, to go to school to not go to school, to go to work or not. All of these mundane choices. But these small choices are the building blocks in configuring what type of person someone is. These small, mundane choices are what David Foster Wallace calls fundamental choices. These choices determine your character, and ultimately ones destiny.

Although your everyday choices shape and mold your character, free will is a variable. Which means at any given moment, you can change what kind of person you are. A persons day to day fundamental choices can alter which can change their character as a whole. Of course alterations can be a positive change and can also be a negative change.  A person can go from being a loving, and kind individual to becoming a selfish and self-centered individual. Along with altering what kind of person someone is based on their day to day actions, there is also an alteration on how they engage in the world. People who have a positive fundamental choices view the world in a different light. They believe anything is possible through aspirations and hard work. While people with negative fundamental choices go through life with a glass half empty mentality. They believe things are impossible and cannot be achieved. Anything is capable of being achieved, as long as a person’s fundamental choices are positively intact.

In my opinion this idea that David Foster Wallace has is completely credible. By saying that life choices are completely up to that person, and not predetermined make complete sense. We so very often attempt to make excuses to why our lives aren’t certain ways. We say things like, life may have simply gave us a poor hand. We search, and search for excuses for why our lives aren’t ideal, when simply the answer is right in front of us. Our lives are not ideal because we didn’t make them like ideal. It’s our fundamental choices, the small things that build and make our lives. Who we spend our time with, what we do with our times are all aspects of free will, which ultimately mold our fundamental choices; choices we make without hesitation.

When I am faced with difficult decisions I try to think about what people who I admire would do if they were in the same situation. The two people I admire the most is my grandmother and my mother. Their actions have been the foundation to all of my fundamental choices in life. Both my mother and grandmother have positive outlooks on situations in life. When turmoil is present within my life, I think positive. I try to find the good out of every negative act that occurs in my life. My grandmother would always tell me if I look for the good in the bad, the bad won’t seem as bad as it really is. And when something doesn’t seem as bad as it really is you can handle the situation better. I had the freewill to choose to follow my grandmother and mothers positive outlook on life, and I choose to follow it. This allowed my fundamental to be positive ones.

In the audio version of David Foster Wallace’s commencement address the audience begins to laugh in denial when he says a graduating high school class of young adults does not truly know the meaning of day in a day out. We have been confined into a bubble. We have not truly been exposed to the world where we can determine what our fundamental choices of life are. We have yet to be confronted with the real world. Of course as teenagers that have overcome four years of education we believe we have experienced, we have lived. When actuality, it’s not the four years of school that constitutes and validates what we have been through but what we do with what we have learn that validates life’s experiences and values. It’s not until the diploma is in our hands and there is no one looking over our shoulders that we have experienced a life in the real world that involves making every day fundamental choices.