There’s a minor memory from my early days as a mother that I always recall with shame. It was just a little thing. My toddler ran out ahead of me and went through a set of automatic doors, but stumbled, and ended up standing in the way of the doors as they closed.
In disproportionate terror (because all of my emotions were outsized at the time), I thrust my hand into the doorway to make the doors open. Then I snatched it away. Then I stuck my hand out again, and then I snatched it away.
I did this, rapid-fire, several times while the door opened and closed and opened and closed and my child cried in bewilderment. Finally, some saner person stepped in, body-blocked the door, and we all emerged on the other side.
Nobody was hurt but I was ashamed and disgusted with myself. I contrasted myself, savagely, with people who run into burning buildings to rescue children, or who dive into frigid water to save a drowning stranger.
“I didn’t even think about it,” they tell the reporter covering the scene. “I’m no hero; I just did what I had to do.”
Whereas I, a mother who allegedly loved her children, couldn’t even get myself to stick my hand in a door to save my baby from being crushed. SOME MOTHER. That’s what the reporter would say about me. SOME MOTHER SHE TURNED OUT TO BE.
But over the next 25 years or so, I have learned something about heroism, and choices, and free will.
We tend think of free will as the less emotional, more muscularly logical part of us that objectively assesses our choices and consciously selects good or evil.
Free will is, we imagine, when we find ourselves suspended in a sort of temporal vacuum, evaluating facts, desires, and fears, and make a calculated choice to do whatever it is we want to do.
And that’s probably why people who’ve done clearly heroic things feel uncomfortable with praise. They didn’t evaluate the risk, recall that God told us to love our fellow man, and deliberately choose to charge into the inferno. They just acted, and it didn’t feel like a choice at all.
But free will is both more complicated and more basic than that.
Sometimes I do use my free will with calculation and deliberation. I realise I’m being tempted to do wrong or prompted to do good, and maybe I struggle, and then I make a choice. But sometimes I do just act. I do just do the right thing, or the wrong thing, without thinking.
This, too, is a variety of the exercise of free will, because it comes from the kind of person I have previously decided, over and over again, to become throughout my life.
That’s probably what we see when someone acts heroically without thinking. He has primed himself, through a lifetime of little choices, to be the kind of person who will do the right thing without deliberation. He is acting out of the centre of who he has chosen to become.
So the person who leaps without thinking is, indeed, a hero, and he did, indeed, use his free will.
So, then, what about the weird “should I or should I not save my kid” thing I did all those years ago?
Did I hesitate because, deep down, I only sort of cared about her?
I’ve learned to look more gently on my past self. Of course I loved my child. Of course I wasn’t really torn about whether or not to let her be squashed before my eyes.
I hesitated, and chopped my arm in lieu of anything useful, because I was incredibly sleep-deprived, and mentally, physically, and emotionally overwhelmed all the time, and perpetually hollowed out with self-doubt, and that’s what lead to my irrational behavior.
I wanted with all my heart to do the right thing, but I literally didn’t know what was the right thing to do. I never knew what was the right thing to do. So I chopped my arms up and down like a weirdo, and didn’t achieve anything. But we came out OK.
Just as a thousand acts of generosity and unselfishness train you to do the right thing without hesitation, a thousand little cuts that weaken your psychological and physical sense of self can impede you from it.
We’re trainable, but we’re not machines that can be programmed with precision. It’s complicated.
Anyway, I remembered this moment as I gazed, the other week, at the giant, slightly kitschy mural over the altar at our church. … Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
