A year-long lesson

It's been a year of learning curves, and Indecision was a core source of most of my trips and missteps throughout the process. A year seems way too long to learn that I am indecisive, let alone learning how to be decisive. What is it with indecision that makes me conclude that it's been lurking behind many of thee major pitfalls that I've had this year? Indecision is a very slippery term and could be sometimes mistaken to be just bad decisions, or something of the sort. But indecision was something I didn't know could be worse than actually making a bad decision.

To put it into perspective, there are simple choices (I'll use choices and decisions here interchangeably) like deciding to wake up, or deciding to have some food, or choosing to go out for a run. But let's face it-such choices like these mentioned have something in common that both you and I can agree is true. If not, you can correct me, but all those choices or decisions have a consequence that can be directly seen. The consequences sing to the tune of something like if I don't wake up, then I might be late for work, or class or [place something else here], if I don’t get some food, I'll end up on a revenge mission of overeating later on, if I don’t go for a run, then I wont keep up with my new year's resolution, and all those goals I set for myself. As you can see, most of such choices bear with them, a certain clear consequence at hand, or at least a result that can be visualized. Such decisions, are relatively easy to make. They might not necessarily be easy to keep, but I put them in the category 1 of decisions i.e. those that you can clearly see the end result, and has a divinities result. Such decisions, as I have come to learn, tend to be made often daily, or on a quite regular basis. And yes, yes, they might not always be the simplest to make, but with such, it is easy to weigh in the pros and cons before making such a decision.

Then there are the other kinds of choices that involve so much fog, and mist, and smoke, and everything else that seems to block where you see making such a decision might lead to. To give more context to this, such decisions might be preceded by something like: I've been hanging out with this girl, and I like her, so where do we move on from here? Or I've been doing such and such a course, and I like then, should I dig deeper into them or try something else. It might be unfair to compare a love relationship with someone else to choosing a major in college but the corollary that I want to draw is that the results of making a decision, when presented with a situation where the unfolding of it might very well be obscured by being in a future that is undetermined, remains unknowable. And maybe we could put placeholders for what might happen in the future, like: in the case of the girl that I like: We will end up having a good relationship, marry, have kids and be happy, or in the case of choosing a course to pursue: I will end up having a successful career, and self gain self fulfillment. However, a big chunk of such kinds of futures remain undecided.

While the answers to such questions might seem cheap sometimes, like just go ahead and try it out, commitments (as most decisions tend to take the form of commitments) do play a big part decidedly in other daily simple choices. Such decisions fall into Category 5 decisions. Don't worry where category , 3, or 4 are. I just used these scales to make sure you can picture the different levels of decisions. And I'm sure the rest fall in between there somewhere.

I tend most of the time, to go undecided about this matters, and sometimes stretch them way past due. Going undecided feels something like this: telling myself we’ll see what's going to happen or a different version of that "waiting". Over and over again, the procrastination monkey(A reference to how procrastination works) reminds me how emotionally and mentally draining it is to make such decisions. I might as well put them off until some other time. However, there's little or no true love given to the subject of the decision. I may end up just seeing the tip of the iceberg and miss out on seeing the while beauty underneath. Nonetheless, there is a far worse characteristic of indecision that makes it more distasteful than bad decisions themselves. Since thou art lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will [spit] thee out of my mouth. No one likes to see vomit come out of someone. And this is the picture that John draws in Rev 3:16. You can go read further on the context of this verse but this leads me on to point out, that you need a friend, or someone close to you who can point out the effects of something that may be caused by indecision. Perhaps a relationship becomes strained because of the failure to decide on the expectations, or grades drop because of wanting to try each and every course here and there. I see that both of these examples at one point was true of me, but it wasn’t until a friend made me to take a second look at why this happened that I realized it was because I hesitated in making a decision. I was indecisive, and didn’t want to choose this over that in light of a future that I don’t know.

At one point this year, over the summer, I left the house so often to go and hang out with my friends, and help them in this and that, to hang out with them and catch up with all that. This happened so often that when one time a friend called me to help out run an errand, I said yes, packed my stuff up to prepare for a sleepover, and walked downstairs intending not to eat dinner that my mom had cooked, only to be sent back up to my room, and given a plate of food without chance to defend my cause of action. It was simply a case that my mom would have none of it. According to her, i couldn’t seek to please all my friends and just appear when they needed me. Of course I was naive to see this then. But with the hindsight of memory, this is a symptom of not thinking about what kind of relationship or friendships I want with others. What were the limits and borders? I clearly never decided on this.

I think this brings us to the most painful thing that you can do to someone, or even to your own self. As time moves on, doubt begins to take the place of the decision. If you actually liked the girl, you begin to question whether or not you can trust your own emotions. Even more painful is what emotional turmoil begins to set in inside the hearts of other people. We can go on and on about what it means to make such decisions, but when you roll the dice you can’t always keep it rolling forever as you think of what to do. Things just don’t work that way. People need to move on, you need to move on. And this limbo that exist, is but a temporary space, that isn’t meant to be occupied forever. While not everything can or should be extrapolated to indecision, they can be seen often to shed light to a bigger problem when seen under this lens. If 2017 has taught me nothing else, the upshot is that I will take this proudly into 2018.