I choose the contents of my life.

Look at a calendar three weeks out, while it is still mostly blank. Everything that will fill it gets there because someone said yes, and most of the time that someone is you.

The yeses are easy to see. The nos are invisible, and there is one attached to every yes. An evening spent here is an evening not spent somewhere else, quietly, without any decision ever feeling like it was made.

That is where most of a life gets decided. Not in the dramatic choices, which are rare, but in the small automatic agreements that fill a Tuesday before you have noticed the week starting.

One deliberate no changes the contents more than any resolution will.