Decision Making

But what if...?

Glad I made the decision to see this sunset :)

I’ve recently had to make a decision. Now, zooming out, this decision was a spectacular “problem” to have. “Problem” is actually the wrong word for it, as I was blessed with two different beautiful options. Most would say that I couldn’t go wrong with either. Yet it’s hard to tell that to a brain like mine. This decision kept me up at night, tossing and turning, trying to figure out which of the two options was the most honest to my heart and my head and my soul. If you knew the details of the decision, this may all feel a bit ~dramatic~, yet this experience of making a decision led me to explore and wonder about the essence of decision making itself.

Normally, when making a decision, my gut is quick to tell me what’s up. Whether or not I like what it has to say, my gut is (normally) loud and clear about what it wants and what it doesn’t. Yet, the issue arose when my gut decided to stay silent on this one. One day I’d wake up leaning towards option A, yet the next I’d be sure I had to choose option B. Feeling frustrated with my gut for sitting the bench on this one, I decided I had to take matters into my own hands. I pictured myself, like REALLY closed my eyes and pictured myself, living out both possibilities as the BEST version of each one. The result: I felt really happy and satisfied and excited for both. Okay fine, I’ll try this the opposite way then. I practiced the same tactic, yet this time pictured the worst outcome for both opportunities, one where things did not run smoothly in either situation. This led to me feeling entirely turned off from both options. So should I create a third option for myself?? I pondered. No Emma, you literally can’t even decide between the two in front of you already! I just wanted someone to tell me what to do. Tell me which decision I would look back on feeling the best about. Tell me which would lead to the greater amount of fulfillment and happiness.

Yet as the days went by and I gave myself a break from wondering, I realized something. Who do I think I am? Picturing one decision playing out this way or another decision playing out that way might as well be the biggest waste of time and energy known to man. Why? Because the future is untold!!! We have no idea what may happen in the next hour or minute or second. Let alone how something will look in a month, or how we MAY feel in a year. As much as we know ourselves, there are so many factors, TOO many factors, out of our control to possibly even think up a way that something may look or feel. Realizing how out of control I truly was, I finally felt some freedom about making a decision. WHO KNOWS what anything will be like? Literally no one. Not until it’s happening. BUT- What do we know? Every decision leads to something. On a small scale: when to leave the house, where to eat dinner, or who to call on the phone throughout the day. Or the big stuff: who to marry, where to settle down, how to spend your money. All of these decisions have the power to lead to SO many different scenarios, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I feel like when I was younger, this thought would feel scary. Like, if every decision holds this much weight, then how stressful is it to choose the RIGHT one? Luckily, this year has taught me that there is no RIGHT one. Since the slate is blank, ANYTHING is SOMETHING. Whether you choose this door or that door, there is most likely goodness and sadness and learning curves and magical moments and hard times and all kinds of every emotion behind both.

As I was analyzing decision making, I was reminded of this beautiful quote from The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s novel:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

This quote is a wake up call to stop overanalyzing, stop overthinking, and stop getting in your head. Acknowledge your opportunities and make a choice to embrace them fully. Choose one and then go into it with full force and certainty. The beautiful thing about doing that is that 1) it could bring you happiness OR 2) you could realize you don’t like it and still have enough time to drop it and choose something else!

“In the days ahead, move confidently onward, trusting there is no such thing as a wrong choice, a wrong turn, a wrong direction. There is only what comes next.”

(not sure where I saw this quote but I had it saved in my camera roll and thought it was so true)

As I was writing this, I began to wonder if this is even a universal experience for all. Not making decisions in general because duh, but more so thinking THIS heavily about them. Some of my friends who study zodiac signs tell me that I’m so indecisive because I’m a Libra. Whether or not that holds truth is debatable, but luckily Mari Andrew has described the exact sensation I feel. In one of her weekly newsletters Mari Andrew writes:

“Perhaps the most generous take on this personality trait is that I’m insatiable: I want it all! As a writer, I’m so interested in others’ lives that I long to try on their lives, feel them on my skin, know exactly what it’s like to have a big apartment or a husband or a green thumb. I’m distressingly curious the same way I’m a dissatisfied traveler: I see so many different ways of experiencing the world and I can’t get enough- I need to know exactly what it’s like to be a Sicilian fisherman or I simply can’t know peace. Through that lens, it’s so much less about my deficiency of gratitude and much more about how deeply I want to learn, know, feel, experience for myself. I get FOMO easily, but for my un-lived life more than anything. I can work up a jealousy for my own sister-lives: the version of myself who went to a different college, stayed one more day in Guatemala, accepted one more drink from the compelling bartender. I’m jealous of the version of myself with a different haircut.

As Mari Andrew PERFECTLY summed up, the idea of an alternate choice being better or more fulfilling is something I tend to obsess over.

So here’s the thing. I thought that maybe by the time I sat down and wrote this I’d have something profound to say about how I reached my decision. Some sort of method or thought process or tactic that I found could be universal in the world of decision making. But to be completely honest, I think everyone is way too different for that. What works for me might not work for you. To reach this particular decision (that I’ve been so ominous and vague about for no reason other than that it’s beside the point and also not that deep) , here’s what I did:

I pictured a higher being (something that has some sort of actual control) coming to me and announcing that unfortunately I was no longer allowed to choose option A. Then, that I was no longer allowed to choose option B. More or less, I went with the option that left me feeling more disappointed when it was taken away from me. Maybe that is my gut in the end of the day. Maybe that’s a classic example of subconsciously weighing the pros and cons. Who knows. The main point of what I learned through this process was way less about how to make a decision and way more about the nature of decisions themselves. How humans are so funny to think they can predict the future in any way. As if we know how to picture a moment, as if we already know the pros and cons. When really, each path will ALWAYS be different than expected. At least in one way or another. The beauty simply DOES lie within the unknown. The sooner you release the notion that there is a such thing as a “right” and “wrong” decision for yourself, the sooner you’ll get to sit back and relax and let life do its thing.

Do you struggle with decision making too? Or do you think I’m crazy? Let me know your thoughts. Thank you for reading <3