I was raised to believe in right decisions. As in, I always want to be sure that I’m making the right decision. And recently, I realized that sometimes, this can be paralyzing. Sometimes, I get so scared that I will make the wrong decision, that I fail to make any decision whatsoever.
Recently I had a minor major melt down as a result of this thinking. The past year of my life has been decision filled and I started to second guess a decision I made and felt was right. And then I started to second guess my ability to tell when a decision is right or wrong. (Yes, I do realize that I’m relatively mental…so don’t think that you know some great secret that has somehow eluded me).
I was seriously in crisis mode.
And then I had this epiphany. That as people on this earth, we are given agency or free will with which to make decisions. That’s not to say that sometimes there is a right decision for you (please know that I am not referring to the moral sense of the word right…stealing is always a bad decision), but it is to say that sometimes there isn’t a right choice.
That was the epiphany. Some of you might be thinking that I’m joking because this is so clear to you…but it wasn’t to me. But it makes perfect sense now. I realized, in reference to the huge decision I have coming about where I want to spend the first few years of my new career, that unless I get a very clear feeling that one opportunity is the right opportunity, I can make the decisions that makes the most sense for me.
This was such a liberating epiphany. It also made me realize how much I like being able to fall back on the knowledge that I know that I made the right decision…especially when the going gets tough. It’s so much easier to deal with crap when you have someone else (in my case, God) who I can hold responsible for my difficulties.
And another little remembered insight; the nature of having to make a decision is that you have to choose, which infers that you will be sacrificing one option for another. And in difficult decisions, those sacrifices can be very painful on either side.
So, the bottom line. I feel great. I get to decide what I want to do and then own that decision and the sacrifices it requires. And the crisis is over. Yay!