Decisions, Decisions

When you were a little kid and you needed to make a decision about your life, it was simple. Do you want to go to Grandma’s house or should I turn this car around right now? Okay then, stop fighting, you two! And you and your brother stopped fighting, because you loved Grandma and she probably baked a pie. Not to mention, no one ever noticed you digging into Grandma’s candy dish, where you would eat as many dusty Humbugs as you could free from the hard, sticky ball they had become. 

Now, life decisions are more difficult, like trying to find Humbugs. There’s more nuance and more complications. Everything is shades of grey, not black and white like a choice between Grandma’s house or heading back home.

This is my way of saying that I miss Ken and Ryan at CJBK. I already miss the short-hand, no-need-to-say-it, mind-meld that Ken and I had on the morning show, and I miss his life stories and his easy friendship. It’s unfortunate that my decision to leave – the right one for me – means not having those guys in my daily life, at least, not in person. But if I had concentrated on that part of my decision, it would have kept me inert.

We complicate decision-making unnecessarily by exploring every possible tiny detail, telling ourselves we are being thorough, when we’re really just cluttering our minds. World-renowned philosopher Ruth Chang upended my world with her simple advice about decision-making. I’ve likely mentioned it before, because it’s become so important to me. Ruth says, imagine the kind of person you will be in each scenario. Which person do you want to be? It’s that simple. The details take care of themselves.

We also worry about opportunities being a “risk”. Life is a risk. Driving on the highway is a risk. There’s risk in everything we do, we’ve just become accustomed to it and accept it. When something new comes along, we tend to identify it as the only risk in our lives and that’s flawed logic.

It’s taken a lot of life lived to come to a place where I consider my own decisions as if I were advising a friend; kind, gentle and often asking the question, what’s the worst that could happen? The worst, it usually turns out, would be not taking the new road, and always wondering what might have been.

Speaking of advising myself like a friend, I learned from the best: Erin Davis, another woman who knows a thing or two about making difficult decisions, wrote a beautiful post about my departure from CJBK. You can read it HERE.