Don't make the right decision

Peace doesn't exclude pain

It’s been a year of big decisions. Aren’t so many years like that? Maybe you’ve had to make some heavy ones. Maybe you’re facing them right now. Earlier this year I had to make some big ones around work, money and home education in the winter and spring. Here in the autumn, we’re deciding where to live (including whether to move into a murder house - more further on!). “Is this the right decision” has been a recurrent theme and the cause of much agonising.

At the height of indecision, weighing up everything can often take its toll on my body, disrupting sleep and eating patterns, and ironically making it even harder to make decisions. If you too do a lot of thinking and feeling, this kind of upheaval might not even be reserved just for the big choices. The same level of torture can be applied to what Christmas presents to get loved ones or what family film to watch on a Saturday night. Because it’s not really about the decision, it’s about the demand for perfection, real or imagined, from outside or within.

When I start wondering what’s right, I generally have to ask myself whether “right” is code for “perfect”. And when it is, do I really mean “free from pain”? Sometimes it helps to think about what “wrong” would look like. Generally wrong isn’t unlivable or world-ending. Many, many things can be quit, adapted, endured for a time or altogether changed down the road, if needed. 

The idea that everything is pressured and permanent, and therefore the perfect decision must be made, comes from the multiple systems of control we exist in. 

The school system in the UK (and in Trinidad and Tobago where I grew up) pushes young people to make weighty decisions about their future early in their secondary school careers. Never mind that so many of us in our 30s, 40s and beyond are teaching ourselves new things and figuring out different directions we might want to go in. And from the outset, rewards and punishments discourage mistake making and experimenting.

Religion often doesn’t leave space for us to play freely with different ideas, to try on different beliefs and drop or move them around as we go. So much dogma gives even small decisions the weight of eternity. There’s only room for black and white decision making when the risk is damnation.

Capitalism offers a limited definition of what makes a good decision, insisting that we weigh everything in money and adhere to a flattened, white patriarchal vision of success. There’s no space for valuing the soft or invisible where the output isn’t necessarily clear or paid.

I made a decision earlier this year to shrink the self directed education project I run to a shape and size that I could more effectively and sustainably hold. It was an incredibly difficult choice to make. There wasn’t a direction I could go in (including carrying on with things as they were) that didn’t involve pain. I found that what I was reaching for was actually a decision making process that felt peaceful. And peace does not exclude pain.

To be at peace with my decision making, I need to release the notion of there being just one right decision that can be made and that if I try hard enough I can debate or feel my way into it. That tight grip roots decisions in logic, control or fear. Putting these three in the driver’s seat can have us perpetually looking to others, outsourcing our decisions based on what they think. But denying them is also futile and unhealthy. Our logic is essential, our need for at least some control is real and fear tells us that feeling safe matters. 

Peace brings our full selves to the decision while recognising that we can’t control every outcome. In a sense, we often can’t know if we’ve made the best possible decision because we can’t possibly know for certain what the alternative would have been.

All of this has come into play recently when thinking about where we might live. We have the privilege of a lot of choice in the sense that we may be able to afford a few different options (where so many can’t buy property at all) and we aren’t tied to a very small area. In another sense there’s not a lot that’s available at the moment so we’ve been assessing quite different houses and areas, verging on information overload. 

Logic and feeling converged at one stage when we decided to go for a house that seemed to tick most of the boxes then found out that someone had been murdered in it 30 years ago. I know for a lot of people this would have been an instant “no” but we considered it, having already put an offer in. Did this new information change the way we felt about it? In the end we decided that logically we didn’t want to have potential difficulty selling the house on if we needed to, that we didn’t want to hide the info from the kids now that we knew and that our feelings, even if not purely logical, mattered. 

It was still really, really difficult for me to release this option. When I reflected on why that was, I realised that I was holding on to the notion that one house would be “the one” and what if the murder house was it?! When I’m well resourced and relaxed, I can a) hear how that sentence sounds and b) I actually don’t feel like “the one” is a concept that’s helpful to most decision making. But overwhelm can make us tighten our grip.

In that state of tension, we struggle to connect deeply with all of our complicated feelings or to think with clarity. That’s what makes it difficult to make a decision we can feel good about. It’s like that bit from Inside Out (I watched it again with my twelve and seven year old last night) where Sadness - previously shoved aside - is the one who needs to gently nestle the dangerous idea for it to be taken out and so the emotions switchboard can start fully functioning again. 

For me that’s why rest is so necessary. I need to form and keep feeding habits around renewal rather than waiting for a crisis point. But I can also struggle to take action and that’s where overwhelm creeps in too. 

So sometimes the thing that helps me to make peace with my decision making is not to fixate on making the “right” decision but to first go smaller. Systems of control will have us thinking (even if not consciously) that everything is at a life or death level all the time. What’s the next smallest decision we can make? Maybe the next question isn’t “should we commit to this thing and upturn our lifestyle?” but it’s “should we drink a glass of water and go for a walk?”