rt station wagon was the first car I owned. Bought from an ad in the Anchorage paper for $900 of my own money. It took me to work, to my apartment and to school. It wasn’t fancy but it was enough.

It burned oil—about a quart a month. I made sure to put a quart in every month and we got along fine.

I was buzzing around between the places I needed to go, full of freedom.

UNTIL

I took a road that wasn’t really a road and bottomed out the radiator. This wild patch of non-road ripped a hole and the water poured out of the radiator.

This was not good. What was I gonna do about this?

I calibrated it as quickly as I could:

If I filled up the radiator RIGHT before I drove anywhere, I had just enough water in the system to cool the engine to get to work. Just barely enough, but enough

For a few months anyway. Until the day that the whole engine seized and it was done.

That was the first car in my adult life, and I’ve learned a few things about cars and life since then.

I didn’t have much when I had that car. I had to shrink down to the head of a pin to make it all work.

I figured out pretty quickly that I don’t’ want to live small like that. I don’t want to limit myself to just barely enough. That’s a bad sign. As a brand new grown-up, I had to learn that barely enough is not enough.

It’s something I’ve had to learn over and over. Nature itself works in excess. Plants make far more seeds than get planted. Fruit trees make so much fruit it can’t all be used.

If I don’t have enough and to spare, that is not really enough. I had to buy a car that could take me further than just barely to where I needed to go.

It had been a year since school ended. They’d let everyone back just for the morning but with masks. One fifteen minute recess

It was her last year of elementary school. Veronica had ridden by the school while it was shut down and saw upgrades and repairs being done on the school.

“It makes me sad,” she told her mom. “I would like to use those new art easels on the playground but I don’t think I’ll be able to go back.”

But here they were after all. Veronica didn’t mind the mask, but it was hard to know what to say to the other kids. They had to line up and have their temperature checked and rub hand sanitizer on with no parents.

This continued for a few weeks. And it got to seem usual, if not necessarily normal.

Then one recess she saw it. The dark spot in the hollow by the fence. It would have been hard for the teacher to see. She walked over to it, trying not to draw attention to herself. It was her discovery, only hers.

She finally got there and saw what it was. A black bird—a dead crow was in the grass. She got up closer—not too close—and saw it was lying there peacefully. But it was dead.

Very dead.

This was something that had to be shared. Veronica waved over to some of the kids on the edge of the playground. They came over.

“It’s a dead crow!” she told them. The other kids walked over. More started to come.

They began to discuss it:

“How did it die?”

“It looks so still”

One kid poked it with his foot.

“Ew!” Veronica said.

Now a kid was bringing a teacher over. Why did someone have to tell?

The discussion continued. “It couldn’t’ have fallen from the sky. There is a tree here. How did it get here?”

The teacher made everyone step back and then a janitor person came over with a bag and a grabby claw on a pole.

Everyone stayed to watch. Once the crow was lifted off the grass its head flopped to the side.

Everyone gasped. Its neck was severed almost completely. The formerly beautiful thing was placed in the bag and taken away.

The mystery had deepened. How had the crow been killed? What would cause its head to be cut like that?

But now recess was over.

You need to think about your choices.”

This was how the teachers and staff in grade school would reprimand my daughter. It’s not a phrase I heard growing up. But I think I like it.

All humans have choices to make. Every minute I can make hundreds of choices. These choices happen in the framework of other society. We have a social contract of what is acceptable and what is not.

Laws, rules and customs.

But that doesn’t cover everything. I am largely free to make choices not constrained by laws.

Freedom is a slippery work. It’s easy to make choices that are exactly the ones I made before, running on autopilot of choices or assumptions made long ago before I thought about it.

How free are my choices? Am I the agent of my choices?

Being the agent of my choice is using my own will and taking my own action. Those choices add up to consequences.

The basic consequence is the experience of the action. I experience the thrill of jumping rope. And the further consequence of repeating that choice is I get stronger and my body is more fit.

The experience of eating chocolates is a delicious one, and the consequence of that repetition is my body gets fatter.

These are my consequences. I cherish my freedoms and I try to think about my choices.

I’ll be honest. I choose things I regret pretty often.

It’s those choices towards a goal I don’t regret. And they get easier with repetition.

Making the choice to do the hard thing takes practice. I want to point my agency at the best target. All those thousands of choices are coming at me all day. I am trying to think about my choices before I make them.

I remember one Lakers basketball game from 2004. One of my favorite players, Derek Fisher, was in the playoffs against the Spurs. I’d watched him for a few years and he was a solid player with many championships.

In literally the last second of the game, he made a choice. His team the Lakers were down by 2. I watched, knowing that there was no way for my favorite team to win, with less than one second left in the game.

But Derek made a 3-point goal in the last .4 seconds of the game. The crowd exploded. Jaws dropped in front of every tuned-in TV. Everyone watching that game remembers.

It didn’t happen by accident. He had made all the choices up to that point. He used his agency his whole life to arrive at that powerful moment. The choice to grab the ball, just when everyone had given up hope—it was a long trail of choices.

That moment, that story, inspires me. I want that in my life. I want to make the right choice at the right time to have the experience that I want.

I don’t want to save those choices like a fancy china. I do want to use it every day. I will drop the ball—metaphorically. But I’ll also sink the shots.

If everyone has a chance to make their own deals, why not me? With practice I will likely reach the goal. I’m a free agent.