Choosing Your Lane

I just finished listening to Brick Lane. I bought Monica Ali's book on tape for a road trip that never materialized, and have since been listening piecemeal each time I go on an errand that takes more than 5 minutes. Little Bitty has been enthralled—“Mommy, can we hear the story?”—probably more fascinated by the lyrical cadence of the narrator’s Euro/Bangladeshi accent(s) than the story itself. (It's not a children's book by any means.)

It’s a story of a woman, Nazneen, whose arranged marriage took her from Bangladesh to London with a highly mis-educated, vapid, but kind husband—and the cultural evolution that happens for her and her family in the years just before and after 9/11. There’s a bit of romance and a bit of politics. But the theme is mainly this: Does one wait and allow one’s life to be arranged by fate—by God? Or must you take your life into your own hands?

For Westerners it seems like a no-brainer. We’re all about self-determination, venturing forth, blazing trails. But the book illustrates how difficult a choice it would be if you’d been raised from the womb in a culture where, as a woman, as a Muslim, you understood that virtue lay in allowing your fate to be decided for you. Trying to be a good wife, Nazneen relies on prayer, housework, family caretaking, and mental submission to her husband’s winding academic monologues to suppress any thoughts that might veer into the realm of decision-making.

Most of us would recoil at the thought. (How Third World!) So we do the same thing without thinking.

Don’t we? I do. There are times when, rather than put my mind to the task of accomplishing a major goal, I delay. Let me just wash these dishes; it’s only a few. It won’t take but a minute to make the bed. I can tackle my stuff after I return this phone call. After I create another blog post.

I put my mind to the things I know I can accomplish easily—things I can see. (Look at the china sparkle!) It’s easier and yields a quicker payoff than getting to the difficult business of taking action and making decisions that will have a bigger influence on my fate.

I think for those of us with any kind of religious background, there is, ingrained, the idea that the Higher Power knows what is best for us and will nudge us in that direction, keeping our destination a secret from us until the very last minute—then leaving us to deal with it as best our faith will allow.

But, whether we’re religious or not, the idea of making a decision—and possibly making a mistake—is harder than relying on something or someone else to decide for us: a husband’s subtle preference, a child’s pressing need, a friend’s admonition, the cards in the Tarot deck, a sign in the stars.

To take our lives into our own hands makes us…well, responsible for our lives. And perhaps, deep down, we know what a grave and precious responsibility that is. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because we know how important our lives are—how vital our purpose on the planet—that we suppress, procrastinate, equivocate and delay. We think that our own lives are too important for us to touch. But that can’t be true, can it?

And at some point, for many of us—if we’re listening; if we are present in our bodies at all—the call to lay our hands on our our own lives gets to be too great. You feel yourself pushed away from a situation that doesn’t suit. Or pulled to pursue a calling that gets louder and louder. At some point you realize that you are not fighting against a Higher Power, but responding to Its demands. And when that becomes clear, what is there to do but reach out to your own life and take it in your hands? What can you do but become your own Fate?

That is Nazneen's story. Check it out for inspiration.