This is one of my favorite song phrases. I love it, like many of my favorite specimens of the English language, because of its perfect ambiguity. When I first heard the song (”Shine” by Vienna Teng), I interpreted it to mean “in this broken world which we choose”—implying that this world is a broken one, but that we choose it anyway. To me, that outlook—that we are choosing to live in an imperfect world, because we love it despite its imperfections—is critical, and orders of magnitude above the probably more common fatalistic notion that we’ve been dumped involuntarily into a half-completed wreck of a world and simply have to make the best of it.

Recently I was listening to the song and another meaning popped out of nowhere: “while in this broken world, we make choices.” We are in a broken world, but in this broken world, we CHOOSE. We do things; we take action; we mold our lives and the facts.

A while back I heard someone say that the distinguishing characteristic of life is that it takes action in response to its environment. In other words, to be alive is to choose, to make choices, to take initiative.

You could say that breathing is the most basic example of this. True, we aren’t conscious of our breathing most of the time (maybe unfortunately?), but the point is that to stay alive we have to engage in a continuous process of inhalation and exhalation; taking in and putting out. Life is an extension of this principle. Fish actually HAVE TO keep moving all the time in order to breathe. On a more metaphorical level, are we really all that different? In this broken world, we choose.