The Choices You Make
How the inability to make a choice can take the life away from you.
30 minutes ago, I made a choice. A choice to sit down and read. A choice I made while I had tens of other options to choose from at the same time. And that choice took me down a path that eventually ended me up here. Writing a blog after months. True, the blog is happening because I opened a blank sheet and started typing. But that would have never happened if it were not for the choice, I made early morning to sit and read.
Choices are of two kinds. First, you have the life decisions. Selecting which college to attend, choosing a partner to spend the rest of your life and whether to have a child or not. These choices demand a great deal of thinking, and you do not come across these kinds of dilemmas all the time. However, there is a whole different kind of choices you get to make every day at a much higher rate.
From the time you wake up till the time you decide to call it a night, you live in an endless sea of choices that shape your day for the better and for the worse. Right now, you might have seen this blog I shared in your social media feed. You took a decision there to stop scrolling down and read it. While you made that choice, there could have been hundreds that made a different choice. While you read about the choices in life, someone else might be watching cats getting scared of cucumbers. While you create a dialog within you about what you just read, that person might just get a cucumber and try to scare a cat.
It makes our life much easier when we only focus on the choice, we are about to make next. Because every time you make the tiniest of right decisions, it will lead in a better direction. If it is still hard to understand, think of it as an alternate timeline you create like in the Marvel movies. Every decision you make creates a branch that leads you into a different reality.
Now making all those choices is the second step. You first need to set up your mind to make a choice before thinking about picking the right choice. I have seen many people (including me at times) that just do not put in the effort to make a choice. We just sit there and think of all the options, analyzing the pros and cons forever without taking a call.
Most of us get stuck when it comes to serious, life-altering decisions. It happens because of our fear of regret. What if I make the wrong choice and end up with regret? This fear is triggered from a time where you made a choice that ultimately ended up regretting. While you made hundreds of right choices in life, you will still remember those few that made you miserable. But what you do not understand is that you do not have all the data that you will get after, when you are making the decision. Therefore, whatever the call you make at that moment is the best call you could make with what you have at the time you make the decision. And especially in most cases, what matters is the commitment you have towards that choice than the choice itself.
For example, choosing your life partner. You have no way of knowing how good that person might be to your life before actually trying to spend your life together. And after you tie the knot, marriage life is all about committing to the choice you make to be together. You might be having the most suitable person in the world, but still, it will not work if you can’t commit to the decision you made. On the other hand, if you keep pushing the decision away without popping the question, you will eventually end up old with a house full of cats.
[Please don’t judge me for using cats for all the examples.]
Now living by yourself with a house full of cats is also cool. Only when you made that decision consciously. Not when you were forced to become that because you were afraid of making a call.
This works slightly differently when it comes to the other type of choices. Those are impulsive paths you take to live your day. The inability to make a choice will not end up with you doing nothing. Instead, it will take the control of your life away from you.
For example, as you wake up on a Saturday morning to the alarm you set for the weekdays, you have a choice. A choice to either get up and be productive or to switch off the alarm and sleep till noon. The inability to make a choice here will not end up in a blank state where you don’t sleep nor get up and work. Instead, it will take the least resistant path. We both know what that path is in this.
This is why you need to make the effort to always pull yourself together and make “a choice” than waiting till you make “the choice”. Because a choice with commitment is always better than the choices you never made.
