decisions

If you want to pare it down to the bare minimum, all of life can be split three-ways. There are opportunities taken, opportunities missed and foggy ambiguities. Between them is not much else, and nothing of significance. At every crossing in the road through the years stands a dilemma. Do you go left or right, choose the easy way or the struggle, opt for the obvious or the obscure? The decisions you make will become your life. If you're happy with a decision, it will enter memory as an opportunity taken, one of hopefully many bright moments. You'll look back on it with fondness, recall the courage it took to make the decision or maybe the luck that helped you along.

In contrast, if you later look back with anger or dissatisfaction on a particular moment in your life, it was probably a missed opportunity that's causing you grief. Maybe you had picked the winning numbers on the lottery ticket but were too late to hand it in, or your spouse goes on to cheat on you and destroys everything that's dear to you. Not many events in life to which you retrospectively assign negative outcomes are as clear-cut as the two preceding examples. Most of the time, even with the benefit of hindsight, the waters are murky.

Your past is full of points of doubt where the decision was hard and the alternatives close to each other in terms of possibility and potential gain, almost too close to call. But decisions needed to be made, even if it was by sitting it out and waiting for the situation to resolve itself. Looking back later, you will still have uncertainty in your mind. What would have been had you done things differently? What if you had said yes instead of no or 'I'm sorry' instead of 'whatever'. Depending on your mental strength and stubbornness, these issues can resurface frequently, tormenting you in sleepless nights or revisiting you in a quiet moment when a familiar smell or a sound pulls a long-forgotten detail from the travel chest of your past. You swirl what had been options around your head, trying to figure out how things would have turned out.

Everyone knows that this is an entirely futile exercise. The past is so called because it has passed. It is gone and won't come back. And the decisions that you have made continue to stand and define your life. No one has ever argued this better and more convincingly than Milan Kundera in his stunning novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Over the first few pages, a brilliant philosophy is unfurled that argues that whatever decision anyone ever makes can only be the right decision. As there is no way of ever going back on a decision and trying out the alternative, one can never say that it was a bad one because there is nothing to compare it to. There is no point of imagining all the things that might have turned out better because they might as well have turned out worse. Had you crossed the street which you didn't cross because the light was red, you might have made it to the newsstand to submit your lottery ticket in time and claim the big prize. But you might have also been run over by a truck.

You weren't run over. You're alive, and every breath you've taken since that fateful evening is based on the decision not to cross the street. This was not a missed opportunity, and the decisions you're doubtful about are even more convincingly right ones because your ideas about potential outcomes in a parallel world are less certain. It is from these considerations that I derive the conviction that everything I've ever done was right and good for me. I don't obsess about what might have caused me sleepless nights in the past.

However, there are sleepless nights in the present. Kundera's life-assuring philosophy only applies in retrospect. It doesn't excuse you from agonizing over options and analyzing potential outcomes of actions you're about to make. Time turns all decisions into right decisions by default, but before you make one you won't know which one is the right one, and what you do can have an enormous impact on your life. These concessions are contradictory. You might be tempted to decide something as quickly as possible to get it over with, move on and be able to look back and say, 'This moment defined my life.' At the same time you might be tempted to procrastinate, to give yourself more time because you're worried about the kind of life you're about to define.

This is quite silly and only appealing to those who enjoy the limbo. I'm only very rarely plagued by sleepless nights. I like to make decisions without thinking about them too much, certainly without overagonizing. Lay out the facts, get on with life and assess the impact later. If something turns out to be completely wrong, changes are it can be bent back into shape with some effort. The reasons I'm writing all this in long, tedious sentences is that I have to remind myself of it from time to time. Make decisions!