Shortly before hurricane Andrew wreaked havoc on Southern Florida, I was lying on the sofa in my aunt Filippa’s house in Delray Beach with the air conditioner cranked up to Penguin House. Aunt Filippa and Uncle Louie were letting me cool my heals in their comfortable snow-bird home, before I hopped in my Beetle and slid down to Key West. In the southernmost city of Florida, I was bringing the gift of laughter to my fellow earthlings; a sensational room in a swanky hotel I’d headlined several times. It was also the jumping off point for a month in Puerto Rico and the Grand Cayman Islands. (Working in the Caribbean was a dirty job, but someone had to do it.)
A few minutes before I was stretched out on the sofa, I was standing in the driveway with my aunt and uncle who driving back to Brooklyn with a trunk loaded with oranges and grapefruits for their neighbors in East Flatbush.
“I know it’s a long shot,” Uncle Louie said hanging his head out the car window. “But if you get lucky, make sure the neighbors get an eyeful. The frosties around here could use a little excitement.”
Uncle Louie was a handsome devil in his mid-sixties, tall with jet black hair and horn-rimmed glasses. I called him Superman. A throwback from when I was a kid, because he was the spitting image of Clark Kent. Louie loved to call to his fellow Floridians “Frosties,” because they were either bald or graying on top. We were running errands a week earlier when Louie spied an elderly woman in the car ahead of us. “Holy crap,” he said while we were sitting at a red light. “There’s a giant cotton ball with two arms driving a Lincoln.” I attribute a portion of my wacky sense of humor to Uncle Louie; although, I’m certain he’d readily deny it.
After Aunt Filippa and Uncle Louie pulled out of the driveway, I got comfortable on the sofa with a bag of Doritos propped up between my legs, the remote control in one hand and a cold beer in the other. While I was sipping, snacking, and surfing, I dropped anchor on a local talk show. The moment I logged on, a woman with dark eyes looked directly into the camera and said, “For the first time in my life, I understood that we always have a choice.” I think she’d lost a boatload of weight and followed her dream of becoming a mermaid at Weekewaachie, but I can’t be certain; anyway, that’s not important; what is important was she grasped the power of choice; something she had never seriously contemplated and neither had I.
When I switched off the television, I could still see her face and hear her voice announcing, “For the first time in my life, I understood that we always have a choice.” It was a simple statement that went straight to my heart. I found myself repeating it again and again. At that moment, I began to think about the power of choice and how I might apply it to my life. Could I choose to be healthier, wealthier, more compassionate, more loving? The more “choice questions” I asked, the more “yes answers” I received.
“We always have a choice,” I suddenly said aloud. “We always have a choice.”
It sounds simple, I admit, but it was something of an awakening, a bright moment the likes of which Ebenezer Scrooge experienced when he awoke on Christmas morning. I got it. Recurring messages orchestrating a positive attitude; a sequence of reminders prompting choices spoken aloud; memoranda driving the right choice home at the right time.
The woman on the talk show got it. She understood that controlling her choices from one moment to another was key to achieving her goals. Attending to her own sound advice was highly effective. She determined that if she was going to change, she had to recall the moment of truth on demand, out loud. Smart pledges announcing that the power of choice is always there for the asking. In effect, by allowing myself to repeat choice words at will, I could choose to accept love and give love unconditionally. In doing so, I accepted a stream of consciousness that made my choices honest, authentic, and sincere.
