The only decision I make easily is to put off making a
decision until it is absolutely necessary to do so. I follow the
Yogi Berra philosophy of, “When you come to a fork in the
road, take it.” I tend not to agonize over my decisions, as I
have found that if I know what the outcome will be, I’m really
not making a decision, but I am rather choosing to follow that path. Never
make a decision until you have to make it. If you wait long enough, some
decisions will make themselves, or never need to be made. Either way,
you have avoided the need to choose. The problem with most
situations requiring a decision is that you don’t know where that
fork in the road will lead you. Unfortunately, the truth is not always
obvious, and the obvious is not always true. It is this dilemma that
makes it so difficult to decide what to do at any particular point of time.
Of course, we know that hindsight often makes us believe that we can
tell whether a decision was for the best or not. Yet, that is not true, since
each decision changes the future; and, perhaps if not for the “mistake”
you made in the past, you would never have encountered the good
fortune that you were graced with later on in your life.
I find that the only decision that is consistently easy to make is one
that is a matter of “doing the right thing.” Despite the fact that this phrase
is such a platitude, it is still exceptionally easy to understand. I have heard
people say, “I’m not sure what the right thing to do is;” and I know that
what they really mean is, “I know what the right thing to do is, but I don’t
want to do it.” And that, of course, is a decision too. It is our free will as
humans that gives us the power to make decisions about ourselves and
our lives; and it is that same freedom that also allows us to fail to make a
decision, since that is always one of our choices.
Within any given day, we make thousands of choices, some meaningful
and some non-consequential. However, we never possess the knowledge
to fully understand which is which. This is because our lives are too
complex, too full of twists and turns, ups and downs and intersections
with thousands of others over which we have little or no control. A
decision to have a second cup of coffee can prevent us from being involved
in a deadly traffic accident that might have occurred if we had left five
minutes earlier. We will never know, nor can we tell how our lives would
have changed if we had taken different actions. We can’t predict our
future; and we certainly can’t control the others with whom we share
the world. We can only move forward in the belief that “what will be, will
be,” and that is as it should be. Life is not a puzzle for us to solve. It is a
gift for us to enjoy moment by moment. It is a present. It is the present.
I’m not myself today and everybody has noticed the improvement 37