40+FAB Blog
We are faced with hundreds of decisions every day and they all line up one after the other waiting for an answer. Have you ever been in a restaurant being asked what you wanted to drink? You said water and expected your request to be fulfilled, instead you got more questions, “from the tap or bottled?” “Still or sparkling?” “With ice or without?” at this point you wanted to scream, “Just get me some water to drink!”
It is because we are faced with so many choices that we have to make a decision as to which choice we should go with. Making a decision is simply making a choice for one thing out of a host of other things.
The concept is very simple, yet I found that it was a big struggle for me. Some years back, while waiting for an appointment I was flipping through a book titled ‘On Penalties’ I happened to stumble across this passage, “The human spirit may crave freedom, but it recoils from choice. To commit to one option – to live with a certain person rather than another, say, or to go to this New Year’s Eve party and not that one – is to confront the irreversibility of time. In this sense, to make a choice in life is to recognize the inevitability of death. That’s why we procrastinate, or attempt to suspend the moment of decision, for as long as we can.” This made so much sense to me and helped me to understand the unexplained struggles I had felt about making decisions.
Time is of the essence when we talk about making decisions, and even though decision-making looks like a complex mesh of permutations and combinations of options to choose from, it all boils down to making one choice at one particular point in time. You might have a hundred more choices to make based on that one choice, but they will occur one after the other even though in very rapid succession.