Decisions

Over at Views from the Bike Shed Mark wrote a thought provoking blog about making decisions.  I have a lot of decisions to make each day - sleep on my Condo or sleep in the Hammock... eat the food on offer or don't eat it .... dig in my litter tray or dig in the balcony plants.... kill the valerian rat or the catnip one...

Apartment life removed a lot of decision making from my daily routines.  I used to have garden space to build into decision making (mousing in the compost heap or the woodpile), trees to climb (or not) and neighbours to visit.  

Which goes to illustrate: don't a lot of decisions in our lives get made for us by circumstance? Or, are made once and built into our daily routines so that although choice remains, we keep exercising it in the same way we did yesterday and not thinking about the fact we are actually choosing (as in 'oh porridge for breakfast again, just like we've had every morning for the last 53 years'....That was F's father by the way, except he would never have actually said or even thought that, he'd just put the oats in a pot to soak the night before, like he had always done, and have porridge for breakfast the next morning. He was however making a choice every evening.)

Being able to exercise choice is something we need to practice.  Humans these days live lives full of occasions to choose and probably don't give a second thought to a lot of the choices they make each day; possibly don't even give a conscious first thought to them.  F told me a story about a man she met years ago in port in Baltic East Germany shortly after the re-unification of East and West Germany.  Tomas described the process of becoming 'western' as one of being paralysed by choice.  Too many things that had previously been decided for them by the state (what education they would get, what sport they would play, where they would live, work, holiday, what appliances were available for their homes) suddenly became their own responsibility to decide on.

For him this 'freedom' was accompanied by an enormous fear that he would not make the 'right' decision - for himself, for his children - and that he would have no one to blame but himself.  He had not yet learned the skill of choosing, had not practiced on the small things (yoghurt or apple?) in order to build up to bigger things (a career in music or engineering?).  He had also not yet learned that few decisions condemn you for life, and even most of those can be remade, worked around or built upon so that the outcome is never written in stone.  He had not learned to be comfortable with the risk that mistakes are inevitable, move on.  Mistakes are part of the rich tapestry of life.  They are valuable.  Even the things we learn from our less than ideal decisions add to our library of experience.  The next decision will be better informed; perhaps.  

Tomas had not sufficient practice in critical decision-making to be able to embrace the process of "try it and learn from it", could not yet believe that it will all be alright in the end; if it isn't alright, it isn't the end - keep working on it.

In her A-Z blogging this month Yamini at Doses of Wild Yam, mentioned Freedom (among other things starting with F).  Freedom to make choices and the ability to do so without fear must be one of the greatest things we can promote for ourselves and those we seek to educate; freedom to try to change outcomes and the personal resources to feel comfortable with doing so.

That is rather a long thought process for a cat, and you may well suspect F had a hand in drafting and editing my post today, but every word has been carefully supervised by me.