Choices

May 4th, 2010

perhaps my most consequential handicap is my inability to make choices and never look back. such certainty and self-confidence in my own decision-making seems almost fictional to me sometimes, and i always watch with marked admiration people who know immediately what they want and how to get it. democracy is valuable to me and so i like to get everyone’s input, but most of the time i’m convinced that there is already a best solution somewhere out there that i am simply uneducated about; a median answer of sorts that i can arrive at only if i can find it in a large enough sample of opinions. and so i waffle and i ask and i table and i discuss, and after long last i finally arrive at that predestined best solution. it’s a long and redundant process, but at least at the end of the day there is an answer. yet, i don’t feel a sense of closeness to the outcome, because i didn’t recognize it from the outset. if something were meant to be, you would know it immediately the moment it presents itself to you, right? or maybe not, but most best solutions in the world seem to me to be that way: you come across something and you instantly know. sometimes if i’m lucky this does happen, and then i don’t look back when i make that decision. but like i said before, this happens so rarely that it feels almost fictional. and then of course sometimes i am wrong. i think i knew, but i didnt really. but nevertheless, i still follow my instincts when i encounter something that calls out to me. things that require some deliberation are not, then, the best outcome. by gradation, the more deliberation something requires, the less good it must be. but maybe sometimes our process of deliberation adds some kind of value in the sub-optimal outcome, and after some time, with all that imbued additional value, that outcome eventually emerges to be better than all the others.

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