Light Switch

Trying to reassess things.

I actually had to make a decision this week, a decision about a place to be.  I had an opportunity but for the first time in a long time I sat and thought about where I was and where I would probably need to be.  The outcome of the decision was that I decided to maintain the status quo.

The difficulty with actually making a decision, of course, is that there are ramifications.  If you choose something, something else won't happen.  In my case, the something was an additional series of tasks that need to be completed with little to no resources to make their completion happen.

The immediate result of this is to find myself fighting this vague sense of hopelessness that seems to come as a result of the decision:  the sense that nothing is really going to change as a result of not making a change.  I consciously know I need to fight this of course - a lack of change in one thing does not indicate that all things cannot change - but there is the very real sense that one can slip into it easily.

I intuitively grasp that the focus needs to be on what can be changed instead of what can't be, but the difficulty (as I often seem to find) is twofold: one is simply determining which category an activity falls into, the other is determining what impact such actions will have.  The reality too often is that it seems that even with those things we can impact the result is quite small and washed away in the flood of decisions of those things that we can't change but have greater impact.

So I end up finding myself on the knife's edge of emotions:  trying to feel empowered about doing something even as I try to prevent tumbling off the other side from the inability to influence the things that are occurring in my life.

Is this always true of all decisions, this careful balance between empowerment of action and despair of consequences?  I have to believe that some level it always is - which leads me, in retrospect, to consider all the other decisions I have made that may not have gone so well for me:  did I allow the euphoria of being empowered to overrule the realization that consequences were coming that I could not control (in some cases they most definitely were; I was just too full of myself to see them).

Which leaves me, as it so often seems to, with the sense of feeling my way around in the dark after having consciously turned a light with only a candle left in my hand to navigate obstacles.