When you’ve moved through a period of indecision and into clarity, it’s amazing how the world opens up for you. Maybe not in a physical sense, as in clouds parting and clear blue skies blaring down at you, but more in the inner sense. The chest opens, breathing becomes easier, and your heart just feels a tad bit lighter around the edges.
That’s what my world has been like today. As I near the end of this blogging experiment — only 40 posts to go after this one — I’m moved to think about all I have been through from the time I began. After a period of enduring a lot of negativity (it seemed to come from all directions at one point, especially the people I was hanging around with, or interfacing with in my daily life), I decided to try a year of looking for beauty. Simple on the surface, but harder than it looks.
Since then, a lot of the negative people have moved out of my life. I suppose like really does attract like. I move out of funky emotional states like those caused by these folks in the past easier, and with a lot less drama. And I still feel my feelings, from the high to the low and everywhere in between, with no lying, and no real need to lie about them.
Devotion to authenticity comes with its own pitfalls. Not everyone is going to be down for that kind of thing, after all. It tends to screw with their sense of entitlement to their own misery. But when the world opens up the way it’s opening for me now, that’s all the reward I need to keep going in this direction.
Some days, my mind won’t quit. By now, I have all kinds of tools to get it to quiet down and cooperate with the rest of my body parts — you know, kind of play nice in the sandbox. But I have a huge decision to make, and times like this, which could determine the whole next phase of your life, it gives you pause. You slow down and time slows down to match it. You want to give it the space it deserves, mostly so you don’t eff it up completely.
So I looked into the derivation of the word decision. I am a word geek, after all. It’s the process of determining, as of a question or doubt, the quality of being judged. And who knew? It comes from the 13th century, sometime between 1425 and 1475 from the late Middle English, from the Middle French, all the way back to the Latin for “a cutting off.”
Huh. Fascinating.
Of course, the easy way of deciding anything is to weed out any options you don’t want or need, until you’re left with very few choices. In a sense, deciding to go one way is also “cutting off” another way. This has opened up a whole new way of thinking about decisions for me.
Making this decision means a verdict, a decree, a ruling on the events of my life going forward, which is always strange. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen in the future? No one, really, not even an intuitive like me. You have an idea, you have some faith in your own abilities, you have the support of whomever you’ve gathered around you to take part in the journey somehow. But the bottom line is that I’m betting things get better, and continue to grow and develop, until I choose one side of the fence to live on for the forseeable future.
OK, maybe I took the title of this blog post from Anna Deveare Smith’s most recent one-woman show. It’s a good title and well, steal from the best what I always say. I had some good news today, and it’s taking me some time to decide whether or not to take advantage of it, not do that, take advantage of some of it, wait a bit longer and see what else might transpire, or some combination of these.
Why is it that decisions are kind of harder when you’re aware? When you’re not you can kind of go with whatever sense most needs feeding. If you’re poor, you choose the one that bring the most money. if you’re emotionally needy, you do the one that brings the most attention and compliments. When you’re a little more aware, or are actually watching your reality, you notice the smaller things, and could subdivide a decision into a million component parts if you’re not careful. That could make decisions pretty arduous.
So to reframe this unexpected condition of awareness, I decided to take a break from deciding. By giving myself the time and space to not really think about it but NOT think about it, I tried to see if this would rest my mind a little. And it did. My little experiment worked. And though I’m not any closer to figuring out what I want to do in this particular instance, I’m happy to know what probably no matter what choice I make, it will turn out pretty well. All things considered, that’s not a bad deal, and my mind gets to revel in all that space I created.
