I was out walking Thistle, Troy’s dog, the other day. We passed a man who was bending down to spray weed killer on some plants that were growing up through the seam in his driveway. We greeted each other, and then he said, “I can’t get flowers to grow in my yard to save my life, but weeds grow in my driveway like crazy.”

“Maybe you should change your priorities,” I said. “I love weeds, and my yard is full of them—no effort at all!”

“I just wish I didn’t have to spray them all the time,” he said.

I answered, “You could always change your mind.”

You don’t have to spray your driveway for weeds. If you don’t like doing it, stop doing it. Have weeds. Every time you look out your window at your weeds, thrill to the thought of how much time you’re saving by letting them grow. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

Issa has explored this issue in this post on her blog:

How often do you say that you “have to” do something? You have to go to work. You have to pay the bills. You have to call your mother. You have to clean the house. We use this little phrase constantly. It’s such a tiny phrase, but it has great, big implications!

The message behind “have to” is that you don’t have a choice. The choice has already been made for you, and your actions are inevitable. What a sad dismissal of our ability to choose the direction of our own lives!

For each of our actions, we make choices about what we want and what we think will benefit us. You don’t have to clean the house. You may want to clean the house, so that the house will look the way you like. You choose to clean the house, in order to get what you want. Shifting our thoughts from have to into want to and choose to, can turn a previously cumbersome action into one of satisfaction. On one hand might be the drudgery of having to pay the bills. But a tiny shift in the language brings about the delight of choosing to have electricity. It’s a little thing, but the way we talk to ourselves matters in the way we think about ourselves and our situations.