Every single moment of your life, you have a choice. It’s not an easy choice. It’s not a choice anyone talks about. But no matter what you think about this truth, it exists. It’s hard to hear, and it sounds like tough love, but it’s simply the way that people choose to live their lives unconsciously.

We choose our reactions to external events.

The emotions we feel at any moment are our own. It might feel like the world puts its pain on us that we are forced to deal with, but it’s us who assigns the world meaning. I might look at the rain and be excited that my backyard arugula is getting watered, or I could despair that I can’t go long-boarding on the slick road today. We all have an internal value map that we overlay onto reality. When we do this, we create meaning without noticing it. We don’t say “I see the world as negative.” We just say “The rain doesn’t allow me to longboard today.” We choose the reality that we see without ever making a conscious choice.

This is not entirely our fault. As children, we learn how to respond to the things that make us happy or sad based on how we see others around us respond, how the world rewards our response, and how society responds to us. We learn to write the code that then writes us into it. We become our own unraveling.

But there is hope.

With every second that we exist on Earth, we are granted another chance to step out of the ideas we have about the world. Every moment is another chance at enlightenment. Every moment is another chance to start over. When anger clouds your mind, can you observe it as if it’s across the room? Can you see the world for what it is: a collection of facts that we put meaning onto? There’s a choice in seeing the rain as watering your plants or ruining your outdoor activities. But how many times have you told yourself “It’s raining” without any positive or negative association? Dropping the storyline–removing labels that identify whether a good or bad thing is happening to you–allows you to be fully present in the moment without judgment. Like so much of meditation, logic is flipped: don’t let a good story get in the way of the facts.

But what about joy? Are we supposed to leave joy at the doorstep every moment? Hold your preferences lightly. Enjoy–be in joy–but don’t be so wrapped up in it that it becomes everything you think about and try to hold onto. When you give up the idea of being joyful in every moment and become truly present, every moment is joy. How is this possible? Because there is nothing left for you to hold onto except what is right in front of you. And the present is filled with gentle emptiness.

The horrifying truth is that you choose your reactions. The refreshing conclusion is that we can always choose differently.