Choice...what does that mean? Is it a freedom to relish or a responsibility to bear?

Both...by accepting the freedom of though and action that choice affords us, we are also accepting the responsibility for the outcome (or lack of) due to a decision.
For some the fear of making the wrong decision is so great, that they would rather relinquish their decision making powers than be held accountable. In doing so they are surrendering their greatest power.

It is that power of choice that grants us our greatest freedom The freedom to choose what we want out of life and the freedom to make the choices that support that goal. The freedom to think. The freedom to believe what we want to believe. The freedom to choose who we want to be. The freedom to choose how we will interpret the actions of others, and most importantly how we will allow those actions to affect us mentally and how we will react to those actions. We are free to choose what we will bring to our relationships and what we will take away from them. We are given the opportunity of choice every day, every hour, every minute…prior to each thought or action we take we have the ability to choose what that action or thought will be, and post every encounter with external influences we have the ability to choose our responses.

Often times we haven’t consciously relinquish our ability to choose, we have just forgotten our power to exercise it and we respond with instinct. It is our default system that submit our responses. Unfortunately, those initial instincts don’t always yield the most desired results. Whether it is an innate instinct like our “Fight or Flight’ instinct, or reacting to a situation using old information instead of seeing the situation with clarity and freshness…being blindly reactive, either can hamper the outcome .
What do we want out of relationships… relationships with ourselves, with others...global relationships? Do we desire healthy, compassionate, safe, peaceful ones? Are we acting in a way as to support that objective?
For many of us, daily interactions with others afford us countless opportunities to choose if we will be agents of peace. The opportunities present themselves with all from total strangers to those in our inner circle, our work is to allow our desire for healthy, peaceful relationships and outcomes to dictate our actions.

If we strive to be agents of PEACE, then we must work to be proactive as opposed to reactive is dealing with others. In being proactive we learn to take pause and be cognizant of the fact that bringing PEACE is the outcome we desire. That may be as simple as a smile or allowing someone to go in front of us in traffic, or as challenging as stopping before reacting in the same “knee jerk reaction” when confronted repeatedly with aggressive behavior by the same offender. If PEACE truly is our quest, we must keep that in the forefront of our minds and remembering, that the most frequent and important choices we make is how we will engage with others and ourselves.