Pope Francis often talks of ‘discernment’. It is not only the engine of decision-making in the synodal process throughout the Church, which begins next month – it is vital to living and choosing well in our everyday lives

From the moment we wake up to the moment when we fall asleep, we are making choices, some of them trivial and incidental, others involving the building up or deconstructing of good or bad habits that may have a significant impact on the rest of our lives. How we choose to live our daily lives, even in the small details, can play a major role in how we either grow into the fullest version of who God created us to be, or dwindle and diminish into a shell of that person.

Few people get out of bed in the morning and idly decide to get married, start up a company, commit a murder or cheat on their spouse or partner. Both positive and negative decisions are usually the cumulative build-up over time of smaller choices that might appear insignificant in themselves. We make our major life decisions in linear time, on a particular date, but we also go on constantly reiterating and refining or reshaping these decisions as we grow and change. We make decisions and then spend time growing into them. Many of us make life promises without any real notion of what the living out of those promises might entail. Only time and ­experience teach us what we have taken on. We live in a permanent state of becoming, so that the more we live, the more we become the person we are in the process of turning into.