“Did I make the “right” decision?”
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Okay, let's dive in.
Can you remember a time when you had to make a difficult decision? Perhaps, you were scared to make the “wrong” one. Maybe, you searched for validation in others as a way to verify if you had made the wrong one. Maybe, you don’t like making decisions at all and try to avoid them sometimes.
For months, I questioned whether getting a dog was the right choice. At that time, my life wasn’t set up for it. I lived in a studio apartment and walked, every morning, to an office that wasn’t dog friendly. It was hard to imagine unless I made some drastic life alterations.
Nevertheless, I traveled to Sandpoint, Idaho to meet the infamous, Laurence, for the first time. When I held him in my arms, I loved him immediately and waited for the answer to reveal itself to me.
Should I take him back to Boston with me?
One morning, I woke up and knew what to do.
I canceled my flight home, rented a Ford explorer, and proceeded to drive Laurence (and his sister Leeza) from Sandpoint, Idaho to Boston, Massachusetts. It took 6 days of driving, finding a new apartment, getting rid of my office, and some major lifestyle changes to make it work. But I did. And I’m glad I did.
Conversely, I’ve ruminated over decisions, outcomes, and my future, most prominently when it came to dating. Oh god, I can’t tell you how many times I agonized over whether it was right or wrong. Should I stay or should I go? Was he or wasn’t he? I was terrified to make the wrong choice; so I confided in friends and family, searching, hoping, praying for any hint of validation that would confirm or reject my hunches or decisions. It was a dangerous game; one that often left me confused, disempowered, and downright exhausted.
One day, after a long, drawn-out, melodramatic conversation with my mother about a guy I was seeing, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “Anna, there’s no decision to make here.”
It was enough to startle me. She was right. There wasn’t a decision to make there. I was feigning to do something, anything, as a way to ease the discomfort I felt deep inside of me. To make a decision felt like the best way to control the situation and predict an outcome. But the best solution was more simple than that: Do nothing. Be patient. Wait and see.
In preparation for writing this piece, I asked my friend, Sarah, “How do you know if you made the right decision?”
She responded, “You can’t know. We all want this sense of meaning and order and control. We want to believe there is one right thing to do next, and sometimes the vast possibilities the universe has in store are bigger and more creative. It’s about having a sense of faith that you’ll get there.”
My boyfriend, Trevor, responded, “I don’t really think about decisions like that. I just act when it’s time to act.”
I nodded and smiled.
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said. “I think my best decisions were the ones I didn’t have to make when I did what felt natural and followed the direction of ease.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Exactly.”
The only way to “know” is to take action, and trust, that no matter what—it’s going to be okay. I guess the catch is, sometimes we have to wait until it’s the right time to take action. And waiting can be uncomfortable. It's difficult to sit in uncertainty, practice non-striving, non-conforming, non-judgment–and live in the mystery of it all.
The best way I know how to do that is by silencing the mind, whether through meditation, movement, or an activity where you can “lock-in.”
What do you think? How do you cope with waiting? Have you ever made a decision and regretted it? Or, tell me about a time when you made a decision that turned out to be the best thing ever.
With love and admiration,
Anna Vatuone
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