Torn

Making decisions can be hard.

Pivotal moments in life.  The right answer isn’t clear.  The pros and cons seem to neutralize.

Yet, usually our intuition leads us one way or the other.  This is where friends and family tell us to ‘trust your gut’, despite there not being an intellectually obvious answer.

Career transitions, retirement plans, personal relationships: everything is always in a changing state, all good things come to end.  Forks in the road, and moments that will alter the trajectory of our lives inevitably arise. 

Typically, these decline in frequency as we age.  Every decade offers something pivotal, though.

Trusting intuition is perhaps one of our greatest challenges.  Nuance, gray area, unknowns are uncomfortable.  This is why extreme and definitive opinions are much easier.  We’d rather bucket things into binary places: right/wrong, good/bad.

When maybe, much of the time, forks in the road present merely different options – and that’s all, just different.  Not one option better than the other.

Likely, I presume, what makes this outlook have teeth and not just some whimsical, go with the wind, type of mentality is that two things are asked of us.

First, when ‘following your gut’, we must commit.  No looking back.  If something goes wrong, we can’t blame the fork in the road decision.  All outcomes accepted and work with what you have.  ‘Play the ball as it lies’, so to speak.

Second, this is a movement towards a worldview emphasizing ‘how’ we do something vs. ‘what’ we do.  So, when we’re torn between two (or three) options, which one allows us to move forward in a more graceful way? 

Strangely, this sort of upside-down approach usually takes care of the ‘what’.  Although difficult to trust, envisioning how we’ll be offers us structure and a reference point when confronting competing scenarios.

Thanks for reading.

Mitch

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