The Day I Watched Myself Decide

There is this young and vibrant okada rider man that stays close to my place, same street, and every morning when I see him or hear him greet people, he always uses the same phrase. “How your body?“ He always says it in pidgin, and that is exactly how he usually says it, always. I have not heard him greet in another way regardless of who he is greeting.

I always find it some where or let me say mechanical, until one morning that I passed by, and he said the same thing to me, even though I woke up to a bad news that day. And just as usual, I also replied to him by saying “fine“. Just like I always do to before my brain has even processed the response, my mouth has already said it.

And even more than I expected, that morning sat with me longer than I expected because I just woke up to a bad news on my way out, yet the script ran away. My mind was not in the right frame because I was far from being fine, yet my mouth said it . That was far from honesty.

And this always continues to happen no matter where I find myself. No matter what I do, what I want, or what I say. Even what gets me angry or happy. Everything seems to work on auto script that I I never consciously planned on doing. Greetings, yes, and sometimes things are bigger than getting. Some things, like the position I am expected to hold about marriage, about what a good life looks like, about the age that some things should happen in my life, ambitions too and all.

If free will exists. I think it's not about the absence of these scripts. There are some things like culture, language, or even some things that allows us to function together in the society as social agreements that we cannot escape. What I feel free will might actually be is the rare moment you catch the script running and choose, even briefly, to respond differently. Some days, it usually takes me longer before I catch it, and some other days, I don't even catch it at all. Because the script has been so programmed in a way that even before i process the answer, the default answer is out already before I arrive.

And anything I see this okada man do, he still greets people the same way , nothing has changed. And the last time we greeted each other, I gave him the same response I gave him. And sometimes when I see him, I always delay my answer a bit, not because I planned to give a different response. But at that moment, I got to realize, for once, that there was a question underneath the question, and nobody had asked me that one yet. That smell second that i delayed my answer might be the only free will any of us actually get.

Thank you for reading.

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