I made a decision recently.

It seemed like a perfectly good decision.

Then I thought about it.

That was my first mistake. (lol)

The first thought said:

Do it.

A little while later another thought arrived:

Are you sure?

Then:

Maybe you should reconsider.

Followed closely by:

No, your first instinct was right.

And before long, what had been a fairly simple decision had become a committee meeting.

Apparently, everyone gets a vote.

The Decision-Making Committee

I’ve been thinking about decisions lately, partly because Sheila and I have been planning our upcoming trip to Europe. (I am probably on our way back to North America as you read this.)

Planning a 40-day trip provides an almost unlimited supply of opportunities to question yourself.

Which route should we take?

Which flight?

This VRBO or that one?

What do the reviews say?

Should we worry that there aren’t many reviews?

Book the excursion or explore on our own?

Take the camera?

Take another camera?

Bring the laptop?

Roaming plan or eSIM?

Train or plane?

Every answer seems to create another question.

And every choice creates another road we won’t travel.

We’ve researched, compared prices, read reviews, asked questions and changed our minds more than once.

But eventually I’ve noticed something rather obvious.

There comes a point when you have to choose.

Not because you finally know what will happen.

You don’t.

You choose because, given the information available and what makes sense to you at that moment, one direction occurs to you.

Then you book the flight.

And hope Paris hasn’t moved before you get there.

But Was It the Right Decision?

That’s the question we love to ask afterward.

If the VRBO turns out beautifully:

Great decision.

If the apartment looks nothing like the photographs and there’s a nightclub downstairs that apparently closes sometime around breakfast:

We should have booked the other one.

But how would we know?

We didn’t stay in the other one.

Maybe the plumbing exploded.

Maybe the neighbours were learning the bagpipes.

Maybe it would have been absolutely wonderful.

We don’t know.

Yet the road we didn’t take has one enormous advantage:

Nothing ever went wrong on it.

It exists entirely in imagination.

And imagination doesn’t have to deal with lost luggage.

If Only We Could Try Both

There is a fascinating film called Mr. Nobody that plays with this very idea.

The central character, Nemo Nobody, is an old man looking back over his life, but the story doesn’t unfold as one clean history. We see different possible lives emerging from different choices.

One choice leads here.

Another leads there.

And those choices lead to still more choices.

When I first saw the film, what fascinated me was the possibility of doing something none of us gets to do in ordinary life:

Live the other road.

Imagine being able to make a major decision, live it all the way through, return to the fork and say:

“Okay. Let’s see what happens if I choose the other one.”

Now that’s decision-making information.

I want that feature.

Before booking our Europe accommodations, I’d simply live both vacations and then report back to Sheila.

“Definitely apartment B. Apartment A has bagpipes.”

Unfortunately, life doesn’t seem to work that way.

We choose one road.

The other becomes imagination.

And then sometimes we compare the messy reality of the road we’re actually travelling with the pristine imaginary version of the road we didn’t take.

That’s not much of a competition.

Maybe We’re Asking Too Much of a Decision

Josh Hornick, whose workshops I’ve attended, recently published a book called Bringing Out the Best in Others.

I haven’t read the book yet, but Josh raised an idea that caught my attention.

As I understand it, he suggests that the decision-making process itself may account for far less of the eventual outcome than we tend to think. What we do after making the decision can matter enormously.

That stopped me.

Because we can spend extraordinary amounts of energy trying to make the right choice.

Left or right?

Stay or leave?

Take the job or turn it down?

Start the business or keep the security?

Speak or remain silent?

There are certainly decisions deserving careful thought. I’m not suggesting we throw darts at a board and call it wisdom.

Information matters.

Consequences matter.

Experience matters.

Other people’s perspectives can matter.

But eventually we arrive at the edge of what can actually be known.

The future hasn’t happened yet.

And still we want guarantees from it.

What Exactly Is Second-Guessing?

This is where I’ve become increasingly curious.

We often treat second-guessing as though it contains special information.

But sometimes, what is second-guessing except another thought arriving after the first thought?

At 10:00:

This feels right.

At 10:15:

This could be a terrible mistake.

At 10:22:

No. Stop overthinking it.

At 10:37:

Maybe you’re ignoring your intuition.

Same person.

Same decision.

Same circumstances.

Different thoughts.

Yet each one can feel remarkably convincing while we’re thinking it.

That doesn’t mean a later thought should be ignored.

Sometimes new information appears.

Something changes.

We notice something we hadn’t noticed before.

Wonderful.

Respond accordingly.

Change direction if that’s what now makes sense.

But there’s a difference between circumstances changing and simply changing our thinking about the circumstances.

I’ve been exploring that distinction a lot lately.

Did something actually change?

Or did another story appear?

The Life We Never Lived

This may be where our Thinkiverse gets particularly interesting.

Suppose I take the job.

Six months later I’m having a miserable week.

A thought appears:

I should never have taken this job.

And almost instantly another version of my life appears with it.

The job I didn’t take.

The people I would have met.

The opportunities I might have had.

The happiness I could be experiencing.

Except none of it happened.

I’m comparing my actual Tuesday afternoon with an imaginary life.

And imaginary lives are wonderfully cooperative.

They rarely include flat tires, difficult bosses, illness, arguments, market crashes or waking up grumpy for no identifiable reason.

We can create an entire alternative history and then use it as evidence that we made the wrong decision.

That’s quite a trick.

Everyone Is Doing the Best They Can

Sydney Banks often pointed toward something beautifully simple: people are living according to what looks true to them in the moment.

That includes decisions.

We see what we see.

We know what we know.

We believe what looks believable.

And from there, something occurs to us to do.

Five years later, standing somewhere completely different with information and experience we didn’t have then, we may look backward and wonder:

How could I possibly have made that decision?

Because we weren’t this person, standing here, knowing this.

We were that person, standing there, seeing what we could see.

This doesn’t eliminate responsibility.

Quite the opposite.

We can learn.

We can repair something.

We can apologize.

We can change direction.

We can make another decision.

But perhaps we don’t need to put yesterday’s version of ourselves on trial using today’s evidence.

Maybe There Wasn’t a Right Road

I’m beginning to wonder whether one of our problems is the assumption hidden inside the question.

Did I make the right decision?

It assumes there was a right road.

Perhaps sometimes there clearly is.

But much of life isn’t that tidy.

Maybe there were simply roads.

Going left would have produced experiences, relationships, difficulties, surprises and opportunities we cannot know.

Going right will do the same.

And whichever way we go, life will continue presenting itself.

Perhaps what happens next depends not only upon the road but upon how fully we participate once we’re on it.

Do we show up?

Do we adapt?

Do we notice?

Do we learn?

Do we respond to what’s actually happening rather than continually comparing it with what we imagined would happen?

Do we keep swimming?

Make the Decision. Then Live.

I don’t think the answer is to stop thinking about decisions.

Nor is it to blindly trust our first instinct.

And I certainly don’t want to turn this into another formula:

“THREE EASY STEPS TO NEVER REGRET ANOTHER DECISION!“

It would be international best-seller.

I would immediately start second-guessing Step Two.

Perhaps there’s simply something useful in seeing how much certainty we’re demanding from ourselves about something inherently uncertain.

We gather what information we can.

We listen.

We consider.

We choose.

Then life reveals what was around the corner by our going around the corner.

And if something new becomes visible?

We respond.

Maybe we turn.

Maybe we continue.

Maybe we discover something we never could have anticipated while standing at the fork.

No courtroom required.

So perhaps the freedom isn’t in finally learning how to make the right decision.

Perhaps it’s discovering that we don’t have to know how the road turns out before we’re willing to walk it.

“We don’t have to know how the road turns out before we’re willing to walk it.”

And instead of continually asking:

Did I make the right decision?

There might be a much more interesting question:

Given that I’m here now, what occurs to me to do?

Then do that.

At least until the committee calls another meeting.

Much Love,