Decision-making and Me

Like it or not, life is made up of making decisions. I make decisions all day, every single day. I make decisions every waking moment of my life. We all do. I think, even in my dreams, I am making decisions.

Some people are sure, but it is never like that for me. I sometimes am sure about my decisions, and sometimes I have doubts, but inside, deep within the core of me, I am never absolutely sure. I have made decisions abruptly, and I have agonized over decisions for hours, and days, and in a couple of cases months. Careful deliberation doesn't seem to make my decisions better than the ones I make on a whim.

All decisions are made on insufficient evidence.
- Rita Mae Brown

Robert Frost wrote about decision-making in a poem that he called “Two Roads Diverged.” In stanza one Frost writes,

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could

I guess we could say that this person looking down the road as far as he could is actually gathering data. He was clearly trying to see as much into the future as possible hoping that was going to help him make a decision. MacBeth asked if some old ladies could look into the seeds of time and tell him which would grow and which would not. It is what we all want. Some of us agonize over decision making more than others.

In stanza three Frost writes,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Lots and lots of time, when we make a decision we are stuck with the consequences.

When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment.
- William B. Given

Confidence by tex norman

I hate confident people.
At least that’s what I think I think.
For when confident people speak
they sound sure, and they speak,
not just with confidence,
but with certainty, with an assurance
that we all find compellingly convincing.
There have been times when I have not
only been right, bur I’ve known
I was right and yet the confidently wrong
have managed to be wrong with such assurance
with such certitude, that I have been stunned
into silent stupidity and although I have been
actually right, I have felt very, very wrong.
The confident feel sure, positive, precise, right
and accurate, which is always better
than being actually, factually right.

How could it be better to feel right than to be right? It might be better to be right, but what I yearn for is that feeling of being right. I wish I could just feel OK. I wish I could just feel like I’m doing the right stuff, going the right direction, rejecting or accepting what needs to be rejected or accepted.

Obviously you can never know how things might have gone had you made some other decision. I’ve made choices, seen how the other choice turned out better, and kicked myself for my stupid decision, but I don’t know that even if I’d made that OTHER choice things could have gone very wrong for me.

I was once in a car crash and after I was fussing at myself, “Why couldn’t you have left 5 minutes earlier, or 5 minutes later? Then you’d have missed being run into by that Mustang.” Those recriminations were right, of course, I would have missed being rear-ended by the Mustang, but maybe leaving earlier, or later I would have been T-boned by a garbage truck.

Decision making is just what we do. I'm not sure how to feel better about this.