Crossroads

I wrote about choice and decision making some time ago; it was a two part post.  The first part looked at choice; the logic behind choice and the second part looked at the art of decision making. 

A few times in ones life, one might hesitate to chose and the art of decision making might elude ones self. It generally happens when one is at a crossroad. It is not always apparent to us as we might be in the middle of a transition; for the lucky few that have a defined goal the crossroad may be apparent, however the decision could be missing. We find it difficult to make a decision because we become a bit judgmental. It might be us trying to play safe because of perceived outcome of a decision that might be unfavourable.  As mentioned in my older post a decision is made when a combination of belief, desires, temperament and logic hit what could appear to be the perfect recipe. Our own bias comes in the way of making a decision. We overlook the fact that a a decision has to be made and rather start to think about the hypothetical outcome. We want to prove ourselves right that we could take a wrong decision otherwise everything could be good with us. We feel everything good will happen if we take the other direction. This analysis continues between the multiple choices present at the crossroads and we come to a point of decision paralysis. No one knows the hypothetical outcome to a hypothetical decision, no one can qualify substantially the so-called missed decision, unfortunately we keep ourselves in the confinement of “false assurance” and keep ourselves “deceptively insured”. We get stuck at the crossroads hoping for a way out, hoping that time will solve the equation and a decision would appear miraculously by its self. We hide.  Multiple aspects of our life could be affected. We all keep landing at this crossroad  at various stages in our life and sometimes its a choice between two directions and on other times there may be more than two.  

One has to chose and take a direction and follow one path where we cannot backtrack, however what is guaranteed is that there will be further crossroads in the future and that we need to take the learning from our previous travel, sometimes joyful and other times troublesome and apply that to the newer crossroad that came our way. We can only learn from the fallout of the action and we can only check our next decision and path. We can wish we should have chosen differently , attribute reasons to it, possibly valid too. 

Actively making a decision against the choices presented at a crossroads is difficult. It gets easier if the decisions made on a daily basis are also made actively without bias; for then one has trained the mind to make a decision and the potential impact of the decision would not colour the decision. One would decide on the merit of the choice.

C