Deciding
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.
