Deciding

So yesterday I made a decision.

I know what you are thinking:  a decision.  Good heavens, I make fifty of those a day.  I decide things in my sleep.  Why is he going on about making a single one?

Fair enough - except that for me, making a decision does not happen often enough.

It was noteworthy in that if felt different - not the typical feeling of "Hey, I am deciding to do this" which I can often flippantly say.  It was much different than that:  it was as if a lock clicked somewhere inside when I made it, a simple but profound sense of "Yes, I am going to do that".

It was the sense that for once something is going to be followed through on, that instead of my too-often wild commitments just rolling out of me a calm, deliberate course of events was going to take place which would lead to a conclusion.

It interests me because I am often not one for really deciding - from early years, I have been gifted or bedeviled with the inability to make a firm decision.  Why?  Because I like to have options, because the world seems too often too big to narrow focus on deciding something.

Because decisions are really doors.

We like to pretend they are not, that they are just something we do that we can go back through at any time.  But in reality - and maybe this is a lesson that we simply learn when we become older - every time we make a true decision we walk through a door, a door that will often close behind us and cannot be easily re-opened.

People may react this in one of three ways.  They may find that they like the finality of making decisions and come to engage in such decisions every day.  They may kid themselves into the idea that they can always go back so they either "decide" in such a way that there is no real decision or airily do not remember makining any decision at all.  Or, like me, they can simply avoid making decisions about things as long as possible in hopes they will not have to decide.

My way does not work of course - there are simply decisions that one has to make. Granted, it works no better than the one who pretends they did not decide when in fact they did because circumstances and others will hold you to your decision even if you yourself try not to. It seems that only in the process of deciding and doing so conciously that we seem to find both the greatest freedom and the greatest ability to move forward in our lives - for by pretending to decide or by not deciding at all we are always looking back.  It is only in deciding, in going through and closing the door behind us that we are able to give our full attention to the road ahead.

So yesterday I made a decision.  The timing may not be what I want in the end.  The road may not be quite the journey I am hoping for.  But at least the sound I heard in my soul was not the whine of inconstancy but rather the loud "click" of the lock tumblers engaging.