CHOICE or CHANCE
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
The pace of the human race has not slowed – our pullback, sideline-sitting, and logistics gridlock of the pandemic have snapped back like a severe rubber band snapping event, and it hurts. It hurts everyone in different ways. For some, it’s about survival against economic woes or psychological foes.
Hardly a day goes by that newspapers are not stuffed with contradictory messages, some fact-based, some wish-based, some from the man in the street, too many from the men and women in power, in ivory towers, and each has a strong voice, a compelling and persuasive argument, but most people are confused.
Anyone dependent on the decisions of others knows that confusion is bad for business, and clarity enables people to make decisions they seem otherwise paralyzed to make. Clarity of whatever facts are available to support an action-triggering conclusion (generally superior to a gut check or instinct) and clarity/transparently does not ensure perfect decisions.
Choice, the freedom within it, makes it possible for us to feel confident in those choices because we feel empowered by knowledge, and whatever the outcome, our decisions will be better. No decision can produce perfection or predict the ideal path for unknown future consequences. Still, lack of clarity – for sure – is potentially dangerous or destructive because choices can be desperate or reckless.
Are you sure of something?
If you are, make choices rooted in that clarity.
Are you confused?
Then don’t make big decisions because the odds are not in your favour, and there is nothing worse than feeling uncertain and wrong at the same time. At best, make little decisions – and remember there is no reverse gear on a decision; you can always slam on the breaks, but you can’t go back and unwind choices or the passage of time as if it didn’t happen – we do not have that magical power.
Whatever you knew yesterday is changed now, impacted by what happens today or what you processed overnight in your unconscious mind. A different person is now making choices, so ask yourself if you would reconsider your options for tomorrow based on what changed within you yesterday. And today.
Who we are today: ‘life until yesterday’ + one more day = one day at a time*, lived consecutively. Our experiences are sometimes forgettable, sometimes regrettable, and not reversible – forward is the only gear, and the speed is one revolution of the earth daily.
And each day, we add another; we make and remake and reshape life. If you don’t like the life you have or how it is going, the first action is to make a choice and then live that choice until you make another.
*plumbers can, instead, choose one bidet at a time