Cats and dogs are not wondering who or what they are or what they are doing on Earth or what all of life is for. They are not perplexed. The blessed animals on Earth naturally take life as it comes, and that means they do not live in the past. They are not attached to the past. They love. They are aware that loved ones leave. They understand the leaving you call death. They may howl, yet they do not wear black and mourn for a year.
 
The Earth’s animals do not question. They accept. They also don’t make plans. No animal considers killing himself. Such a thought does not occur.
 
What I am getting to is that you have free will. Animals have instinct. If you dangle a string with feathers at the end of the string, a cat has to stalk it and make a grab for the feathers as he would a bird. He doesn’t have the choice. He has been made so.
 
In your case, you don’t bounce back the way animals do, for you have programmed yourself. You may be your own Pavlov who patterns you.
 
Of course, you are not without instincts. I gave them to you. You have strong instincts to eat and to sleep and to wake up. A human mother has an instinct to protect her children. Mating is a strong instinct that is hard to withstand. Self-preservation and preservation of the species are invincible. 
 
You are supposed to have free will. Therefore, you have decisions to make and so your life becomes more problematical. 
 
You are the highest of Beings because you have free will. You, a human being, are gifted with free will, even though you may self-imprison your free will. You may not even believe in the possibility of free will so hemmed in may you be by the past. And, yet, to even be hemmed in by the past, is a choice you make. You make the choice because of fear and to win approval.
 
You had choice then, and you have choice now. You may have to trod the same roads and so automated yourself that you don’t exercise free will because you crave to stay in a comfort zone. Even if your comfort zone is suffering, you may cling to it. You may hold on to it for dear life.
 
You may spend a lifetime before you find out what you do will for yourself.
 
Free will concerns only yourself. You don’t have your free will to command others and to make others into what you think they should be. You are not the decision-maker for others. Their decisions belong to themselves. Oh, perhaps in an exception, you push someone out of the way of a moving car or prevent someone from shooting another. Otherwise, you are not a preventer of another’s will, or a blocker of another’s will any more than you can push My Will aside as if I do not exist. It is not your place to command another’s will. It is your place to acknowledge another’s will and allow room for it.
 
As much as you may want to, you cannot live another’s life in his stead. You cannot move his arms and legs any more than you can decide his chosen path.
 
Why would free will be called free will if it were not free?
 
It is your place to find out what your will is.
 
You have the choice to not follow your free will. You have the choice not to make choices. You have the free will to change your mind.
 
Your choices are vast.