*and so, he chose to live.

a person very close to me, to my heart, has chosen to continue living.

making this choice and following through with it is the most empowered action i can remember having heard of in a very long time, and one that i am so very proud they were able to make.

in the depths of yourself there is only what you have placed there. often without noticing yourself doing so you will fill the corners of your attention with so much that it seems impossible to espy anything beyond that false horizon. it is a ring of mountains and valleys made our our impressions, and the view from wherever we stand presents only a finite landscape, one which we know in our fibre.

If your landscape is surrounded by places you harbour no love for or have come to despise, if you're blaming yourself for being there at all and there seems no break in the ken it could well seem time to fall into the sky, rather than make a journey to another plateau.

my great companion has elected to live, in the face of all that was set to kill them, they have chosen, and i feel, have chosen well.

-{}-

most of us are here by default, most of us have not made the conscious choice to be alive here and now, and it is something i am beginning to value; the conscious and deliberate decision to live. all of this, everything you perceive, act upon and allow for, is your choice. if you do not perceive it, it doesn't exist; if you do perceive it, it is thn your choice as to how you react.

had they chosen otherwise i like to think i would accept my friends decision, as a secular humanist i believe we all reserve the right to that most selfish of choices; to make the sound and considered decision to not live anymore. but that is false bravado on my part, it is beyond me to accept self immolation as a choice, because i'm selfish and want everyone to myself. there is simply too much to share in this life for me to so easily accept that suicide of an otherwise physically sound person is the right choice, but it is not my right to impose that value, simply mine to express.

as i go on from the shock and this mode of acceptance i have refused to see this from the stand point of victimisation, either my own or for on the part of my friend, i will not allow myself to blame the other for what they have elected to consider. their pain is only my pain by choice, thus i choose to see the immeasurable positivity in electing otherwise (simultaneously their decision to live as well as my decision on how to accept that). it's the difference between compassion and condemnation, both are mirrors on the mind of the viewer, not the stimulus. and the consequence of both love and vilification is only more of the same. seeing this from the perspective i choose brings me to choose love*