Number Sixty Seven

As children, our days are made for us.  We react to what each moment brings, captive of the pleasure or the pain.  The development of a soul -- in the arc of a single life, and over many lives -- grows from choices.  Events don't matter.  The narrative does not matter.  The response to each event is what matters.  The moment of choice -- the path that forks toward love or compensatory acts, toward a sense of thou or mere pain management -- is what matters.  Choosing is the highest form of human consciousness.