When Chris and I first met, one of the things I liked best about him was that he could make up his mind. I have loved that more and more about him as we have spent our lives together.

 

Life is full of choices we have to make. Some of them are big and scary. Most of them are annoying and waste my time. How many hours of my life would I get back if I never had to discuss what we all wanted to eat for dinner again?

 

Choices. What is the best choice of the options available? And how do I determine what best means in any given setting?

 

More than almost anything I love taking an action. Beautifully, life gives me chances to take action all the time.

 

For the smaller things, my actions follow a set of rubrics. I wake up when I commit to, I wash my face, I care for my set of dependents–dog, cat, daughter. These choices were decided long ago.

 

Then there are the times I am presented with new situations. That requires me to analyze what is the what.

 

What do I want out of the situation?

What are my choices to get what I want?

What are the costs of each of those choices?

 

It takes time to figure each of those things out.

 

I’ve learned that when I take the time to understand what I want and look at the choices available, I still might not want any of the options

 

I’ve been able to analyze further and come up with better choices from time to time. A longer search on the Internet, a shuffling of this and that and a more acceptable option is available.

 

That new choice came at the cost of effort and attention. But a choice could be made.

 

Like I said, there are always a few choices.

 

One of the choices is to not choose. Even the choice of doing nothing.

 

I can spend a bit more time in researching what might be possible. At a certain point, that’s just delaying the decision.

 

Take the action.

 

Start moving. It may be a terrible set of choices, but if I pick one, and start moving more choices could appear. Or unseen advantages of the current choice will be revealed.

 

I have seen this happen many times. Start moving and the next set of choices appear. That gives optimism to making the hard choice. It gets better. Take the first step.