Movie quote philosophy

Tonight, after dinner, I decided to relax with a movie. I had TiVo'ed a few, and decided to go with "Gone Baby Gone". Something about 'Boston underworld' was resonating with me. Perhaps it was my recent trend of hitting dive bars in the area, but that's for another discussion. The movie opens with a short monologue that didn't quite resonate with me, and I thought that it would make a great post for this blog. These were the words from the movie, as best as I could discern:

I always believed it was the things you don't choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things. Like it was something they'd accomplished. Their bodies around their souls. The city's wrapped around those.

While I certainly agree that our environment has a significant impact on how we develop, I refuse to accept that it is independent of our choices. Many might believe that they cannot change the world around them, or that they are ruled by their surroundings, but I believe that this challenge has taught us otherwise. We *have* the ability to learn from the world around us, to see who we have become, and to lay the foundations of a path to improve who we are. Over the past years I have learned a lot about how I became the person that I did. Once I identified the rules and boundaries that I constructed and felt confined to, I became empowered to see that they were self-fabricated and, in fact, not real. There are natural laws that I believe we should all obey, but so much of what we perceive as limits or limitations are imposed by our environment. Take a moment and think about the things you did today, and why you did them. Did you have lunch at noon, or did you eat when you were hungry? Did you go to church because it was Sunday, or to try to connect with your notion of God? Did you say 'Hi' to people on the street, or ignore them because they were strangers? I would love to hear about your thoughts in the comments.