Sunday, February 26, 2012

Decisions: They Drip on Your Hand and Kill Insects

I hate decisions.

This is one of the pitfalls of  faith in ambiguity. Ambiguity does not lend itself well to resolution.

I live from a commitment to question myself, the world and other people. It's like a spiritual practice. So I always knows that any choice I make is not "right." It's just the choice that I make. I then can't help wondering what I would be giving up in making that choice over another one. If I choose vanilla, I have to give up chocolate. I will never, ever know what chocolate would have been like. I have forever consigned myself and my life to a future full of vanilla-based consequences. What if I regret it? What if I know immediately that  vanilla was a lousy choice? The ice cream case of that moment is closed forever.

"Decide" comes from the same root word as "pesticide", "homicide" and "suicide". To kill multiple alternatives in favor of one. Decisions are asshole psycho killers.

Clearly, some decisions are more fateful than others. What do I eat for dinner? That will have only minor consequences, unless I choose to eat something which later kills me. What do I wear today? Same thing. It's these big choices that dog me–the ones from which it is hard to turn back–more significant but just as permanent as the cutting of your hair. It will grow back, but you will have to live with it for a long time.

It's funny, because I am not at all prone to regret. I save all my energy for worrying about whether or not to make a move at all. When I do, I tend not to look back.

Our family has some big decisions on the table right now, and I am dithering about them. I have time to dither, so it is O.K. But the moment will come when I have to choose and I will either be holding chocolate or vanilla in my hand.

I need to stop taking this shit so fucking seriously.




1 comment:

  1. I use a magic 8 ball to help with my decisions. This is true.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License