WAIT, HOLD ON, NOT SO FAST
Tuesday Sept. 11, 2018
“What I want.”
Can you define that for yourself?
I do. I’ve done it. Many times. But my answer keeps changing. What I want now is not that which I wanted a decade ago, a year ago – a month ago, or a week ago.
Sometimes what I want right now is different from what I wanted just a few moments ago. Of course that ‘moment ago’ might have been 50 years ago. Or 50 days ago – the problem with a big life and a big memory is that there is room for uncertainty, self-doubt and reconsidering what we’ve done and wondering if a different choice would have produced a radically different result, or whether we would have landed in the same place, in the same circumstances, by travelling a different road. And we’ll never know …
So, what’s my point?
In this middle-life state we come to realize this better, and appreciate that our next decision, that next chance meeting with some stranger or with fate or the next time the phone rings we might learn that we have a ‘new moment’. Fresh chance opportunity. But experience and aging have taught us, if they have taught us anything tangible at all, is that we don’t have to respond right away, we don’t have to accept our spontaneous knee-jerk thought as an irrevocable decision. We just get to think about it. Think some more.
There are more choices than yes or no, than up or down, than sure or unsure.
There is always that sometimes splendid choice of making no decision at all.
That can be a postponement, or it can be never.
