It's the end of a journey again and there is this sense of so many things that I want to accomplish. Just looking at the Skillshare courses and things-I-want-to-do list on my Keep notes.
This idea that so many things to do yet, limited time can make me stuck on the 'deciding stage.'
Author of Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman, writes:
In his 2011 book Time Warrior, the coach Steve Chandler refers to this sort of decision-making as "choosing", and contrasts it with "trying" to decide, or trying to figure things out. You could waste months trying to figure out how to (say) write a screenplay. But to choose one opening scene from among the list of three or four options you've managed to come up with? That's well within your capacities – and you can do it in mere moments. Or suppose you're vaguely wondering about leaving your job. That's a question you could spin your wheels about for years...
"Most people believe a deficit in knowing is their problem," Chandler writes. They "believe that they don't know what to do, so it will take time before they do it… But choosing? Takes no time. When you choose, you've already chosen."
Choosing in this fashion is the defining act of the "limit-embracing life" I explore in Four Thousand Weeks, because, of course, the fact of our finite time is what obliges us to make choices in the first place. For finite humans, who can only be in one place at a time, and only for a few decades in total, every decision to do anything with a given portion of time is automatically a decision not to do a million other things with it – until, eventually, one day your time will run out, without your even having started most of the things on which you theoretically could have spent it.
[...] We constantly have to make such choices; there's often not much to choose between them; and we can never really be sure we made the right ones. Even so, we have to choose. Making a choice – sometimes virtually any choice at all – is what gets you on your way. If the speaker in "The Road Not Taken" hadn't made some choice, he'd still be standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen."
It's all most unpleasant. Which is why we so often prefer to wallow in the comfort of planning to do things later, rather than choosing to do them now. Or as Henri Bergson put it: "The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself, and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.
So, obviously, I don't know if I would make the right choice with what I should be doing with my time. But I can't get stuck on planning and merely waiting to be struck by lightning that will magically tell me what's the 'better choice.'
However, even though I'm not a hundred percent sure that I'm making the right decision, I do them with 100% conviction while being scared too. By following my curiosities and desires, I believe I am on a path that is authentic to me and aligns with my values and who I need to be.
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