Making a choice…but not quite
My partner calls me Pendulkar, a portmanteau of pendulum (always swinging) and Tendulkar, the famous Indian cricketer. I second guess myself a lot, or vacillate about making a decision or do a did-I-choose-wrong-whinefest after having made a choice.
Jeff Bezos once said, decisions are like doors. There are two-way doors, doors you can walk through and then come back out of. Or one-way doors, once you walk through there is little chance of walking back.
I saw a reel of the actor who played Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother – he was talking about decisions as hats, haircuts and tattoos. A hat is very easy to try on and off; a haircut takes a bit of commitment but after that you can go back to a previous version; but a tattoo is a major commitment.
But I am talking about a different strain of behaviour altogether.
It’s having made a choice, but then doing one of two things: either get all worked up about having chosen it, either getting angry at myself or blaming others – but refusing to reverse it – even if it is a haircut kind of decision.
Or, trying to somehow have features of the choice not taken be manifested in the choice I did make. As some kind of insurance or having my cake and eating it too kind of situation.
Instead of accepting and fully embracing the new reality.
And it just wastes too much energy, in the second guessing, in the manoeuvring to have it both ways, and I realise there is a third one.
In actually flipping between the two. Let’s call it wigs or a stick-on tattoo. Wanting a haircut-like or tattoo-like effect, while having the flexibility of changing it or losing it at will.
At least commit to the haircut for the few weeks it’s going to stay or embrace the tattoo and everything that comes with it. Roll with it a bit. Play with it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti has said, “I don’t mind what happens.” (Presumably, I only read it while doomscrolling so I don’t have an authoritative source). Me sir, I mind very much. Trying to stay on top of it or in control of me, the environment, the people around me.
Having quit my corporate job and working on a personal project or an unproven business, but keep wondering, am I being indulgent, but what if it doesn’t work, ooh this might embarrassing (and a second one at that – my my first business not quite being a grand success according to most people – or rather my inherited standards for what counts as success), what if I become unemployable, and what about income what about depleting my savings? Roll with it bro!
Or do it and find out, get that haircut, live with the consequences and then grow it back, but don’t start freaking out while you are somewhere in the mohawk stage and the barber is still working.
I often say myself, there is no right or wrong, only choices and consequences. Live through them.
Redirect your energy (which is really perhaps the energy of fear) into enjoying the haircut while it lasts.