decisions, headlights & baby steps
a while ago i wrote something about decisions. not putting pressure on yourself to make any. in yesterday's meditation by oliver burkeman (the one i listened to yesterday - in his audiobook 'meditations for mortals') he spoke about 'decision hunting'.
what he speaks about is that we should be guided by principles, when making decisions:
only analysing all the options isn't the same as making a choice. a decision doesn't really count until you actually do something (or don't do something consciously).
‘a decision doesn’t get to count as a decision until we’ve done something about it. merely telling ourselves we’ve decided, inside our minds, isn’t enough.'it doesn't have to be a grand gesture. it can be as small a thing as you like. baby steps, but real ones. paso a paso. don't overwhelm yourself with huge decisions, that can be broken down into smaller ones.
writers at work - edgar lawrence doctorow
'writing is like driving at night in the fog. you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'
life is like that too. we spend so much time trying to figure out exactly where the camino de la vida is leading. but we don't need to know the entire route in advance. we can't. we don't need to force an immediate response to everything. we just need to keep moving in the space illuminated right in front of us.
still, our lives are shaped by a continuous stream of choices, both conscious and unconscious. because we are free to decide, even our refusal to choose or our inaction counts as a choice that impacts the world and the people around us.
burkeman: 'somewhere, in the confusing morass of … our life, lurks at least one decision we could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.' not taking a decision is 'a form of postponement, a temporary avoidance of the painful sacrifices involved.'
and yes, any decision is associated with trade-offs, there are no 'solutions'. sometimes, claiming your own true freedom (soberanía) means deliberately making choices for the unconventional.
sunset at skansen on austevoll, norway
