ABSTRACT
Life is about choosing. From the interactional standpoint, we make ourselves through our choices every hour of every day. Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1958: 448) expresses this profound idea when he says, ‘to be is to choose oneself’. But not all our personal choices are of equal significance. Some are relatively trivial, forgotten almost immediately; others play a major part in determining who are and who we will become. In this latter category are our choices about what we believe in, who we love and want to live with, whether we want to become parents and how we want to earn our living. Nor are all of our choices within our immediate control. We are propelled into the world at a certain time and place which is not of our choosing, with specific familial, social, economic, cultural and biological attributes, but it is up to us what we make of the factors which make us.
