Suffice it to say that thinking and feeling about something you want will surface eventually – if it is meant to be. Constantly waiting for the result to unveil itself, and feeling consumed with not knowing that your message has been received by the ‘Law of Attraction Elves’, is highly frustrating, and does nothing but make you yearn for the result even more! Yearning is regarded as non-productive and a form of attachment.
When you send a message to the Universe – all you can do is hope (and believe) it has been received. When you send a letter by recorded delivery, you can at least be reassured that the postage paid will be sufficient to allow you to continue on with your day knowing that something tangible will be passed on. And hopefully arrive at the other end. If you are not planning to become a member of any universal wishing club any time soon, then you will be pleased to know that Hope is a character that will crop up soon and appears to be non-discriminatory – so yearn away if you want to!
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So do we have choices in everything we do? I mean everything? We go about our business and collide with the army of choices sprawled out on our path every day, and seek to find excuses to avoid making decisions, especially if they are too hard to make, choosing to put them off until tomorrow!
What does choice really mean for you? It isn’t really the definition of ‘choice’ per se that is probably hard to describe. It is more likely to be about how the available options surrounding a situation can make it harder or easier to choose. The number of scenarios you have to traipse through before you can actually make a decision can sometimes be draining – and on top of that, nerve wracking.
It comes back to whether you have made the right decision at the time. Have you explored all the avenues; have you taken into account the consequences of your actions and really thought your options through? Have you taken responsibility; are you a responsible person and do you take your actions seriously? Or do you float from one choice to another, playing a game of multiple choice because you don’t really know the answer? You choose randomly and hope for the best.
We are not just talking about whether you bought the right toothpaste, or chose the right wine for dinner; we may be talking about ditching your job, breaking up with your partner or whistleblowing on the next president-to-be! The consequences or risks associated with making a difficult decision have not only taken the choice-making process into another dimension, but have changed your total perception of what choice actually means to you.
It’s just another thing to do each day; it’s an inevitable act to embrace and you may even take solace in the fact it can be entertaining if you approach it with humour. You wake up and feel like being accountable, and sometimes you want to blame everyone and everything on why the choices you made didn’t go as planned – more often than not you know why and you just have to live with it!
If a choice presents itself, it is usually because something needs to be decided but you don’t always have to decide to do something; doing nothing can be the right choice! If I asked you whether you wanted to eat chocolate or cheesecake, no one is forcing you into making a decision; and actually, as unbelievable as this may sound to some of you… you don’t have to eat either of them anyway and can decide to abstain. There are no choice detectives watching… or are there?!
So, we have established that choices have to be made every day – on so many different levels. The ‘choice-making’ process itself doesn’t accompany your set of choices in a flat-pack box, with a pop-up flow diagram to make it easy for you decide – that would just blow the whole ‘free will’ theory out of the window! There are no tiny wafer-thin paper guidelines, neatly folded, crying out in a size 4 font (that no one can read), in twelve different languages, that after ‘scanning’, politely suggests you go to their website. You know, the one that specialises in ‘How to make a choice and live with it…’ or else call them direct for further information. Direct, of course, means that you call a telephone number that takes you directly to their voicemail and leaves you feeling deflated as you get to option 6 and can’t remember what the first one had prompted you to do! What if you make the wrong choice?
I have made a point about the onus being on us to choose wisely, whilst varnishing it with cynicism, but wouldn’t it be great if we could press a button and be privy to a bespoke set of instructions to suit the occasion? What about applying for one set that will cater for ‘How to make a choice and live with it… each and every time’? That would do nicely. Also, ‘Live with it…’, in this context, does sound as though the choice we are going to make will be forged with despair for some time to come, when what I really mean is, whatever choice we make, we have to accept the direction it will end up taking us.
It could be an exciting choice to be worrying over – maybe about whether you go to Spain or Italy for your holiday this year. A decision made in a moment of vulnerability, because you have just watched Under the Tuscan Sun (this is a fabulous movie, filmed in Italy, that you can watch over and over to cement the ideology that the spur of the moment choices you make in life really can result in a fairytale ending…) that now has you booked on a flight to Italy, choosing pasta over paella!
We cannot delude ourselves that every choice we will ever make in our life will be right but does it have to feel right before we make one? When we’re in the midst of toing and froing with ideas, we may feel uncertain that the choice we are making is going to be the right one but we make a decision, for whatever reason, and we live with the consequences – positive or negative.
Right is an interesting word that definitely changes its spots to suit the occasion! We suggested earlier on, that we do what we do at the time, so it must be right in that moment. What follows on from that decision and how you end up feeling is another matter altogether. Most of us pride ourselves with recognising ‘a right’ from ‘a wrong’, especially when our moral compass is joined to our hip and propels us forward, encouraging us to ‘walk the talk’ to demonstrate we have the ability to practise what we preach, and a conscience to keep us morally grounded.
How to make the right choice, when it comes to our own personal affairs, isn’t something we can learn on a course. There isn’t an Emotional Sandwich that can pretend to know the answer either; there isn’t a coach or mentor, a teacher or trainer, a man or woman of the cloth that can claim to know for certain what the right choice is for you – other than you! People can, though, help you to make a right choice.
Everyone can look through their window in their ivory tower and view your life through their eyes. We can choose to base our decisions on how we want to live our lives or on how we think other people may want us to live our lives. Sometimes we consider both, because we have other people to consider in our lives who may be affected by the decisions we make.
A choice, in practice, may fall on an individual to make or become the basis of a group decision. How long does it take to make the right choice? There is the split-second choice to consider and the ‘take all your time in the world’ choice; the lengthy consultation period; the laborious change-control process; the hold fire until we have the facts conundrum (that equates to the ‘how long is a piece of string’ scenario); and, last but not least, the hierarchical approach. This is the one that either involves so many people that even the senior decision-makers have forgotten their remit, in fear of taking accountability, or the inability to agree simply results in a poor decision being made, or not at all. Any form of decision-making that involves a degree of human intervention will come with its usual challenges and will need to be overcome.
Today you woke up and headed to the kitchen to make breakfast, trying to decide if porridge or eggs would fuel your temple through to lunch, or if fruit and toast would suffice. As you juggle the family or simply indulge in your own morning ritual, including high-maintenance activities, you ask yourself, slumping over the worktop half asleep, “Is this really a decision I have to make every day, for the rest of my
life?” Yes – more than likely if you want to continue to eat breakfast!
Now take your imagination past breakfast and think of a more challenging set of choices that have a habit of arising on more than one occasion in your life. How about recalling a situation that had you dialling up the past for advice, only to find that the past is now out of date and the circumstances on which you based that choice then have changed. It would be like going back into the past and actually reading a TV manual for a TV that doesn’t exist now and expecting it to help you connect your new, shiny, high-tech LED screen, with fifty buttons, to the extra-terrestrial dish that now sits on your roof. I knew aliens were involved from the moment I wrote about ‘Sometimes’! It sounded a tad extreme two chapters ago, because we were focusing on how we personally change, and the ideas we had ‘once upon a time’ may change too.
We may not look at the same idea in the same way each time. Almost like a painting that tells a different story as the colours change in a different light. Therefore, a set of choices, now, can appear similar to those experienced in your past, but ‘something this time is different’ and now requires a different approach. Even when you know ‘you have been here before’, this doesn’t mean that you will automatically know what to do the next time you find yourself in a similar predicament. How many times do you find yourself in a similar situation and the circumstances are somewhat different? So, how can you make a choice now, based on any past experiences unless an experience is ‘identical’? There will be plenty of times you can apply past learnings for a quick win, and feel chuffed that this time you finally got it right and you didn’t make the same ‘mistake’. Then you have the ones that really need a fresh pair of eyes.
Trying to repeat the past and applying the same strategy, or reinventing it while still using second-hand parts that didn’t work the first time, isn’t going to bring about a different result. Did you ever bake a cake with plain flour and then found yourself wondering why it didn’t rise? Did you put the same cake back in the oven, having injected it with a couple shots of self-raising flour, in the hope that a repair job would somehow counteract any wrongdoing in the first place? Doubtful! Two words come to mind: start over.
Fear not; simply gather the right ingredients, apply past learnings and then the second time around is bound to be digestible. Now, that is a filling which is seeping in earlier than planned: Fear. There is nothing like a little cross-contamination to keep these wordy relationships on fire. Think of ‘Fear’ as the dab of hot English mustard dotted in your ham roll that is a complementary condiment, but too much of it can tip your taste buds over the edge. ‘Fear’ is going to have to wait its turn, even though I cannot promise it won’t crop up to remind you it is on its way as it tends to interfere.
So, where were we? Yes; it will be through choice that a decision will be made and each decision made will take us either over a step or onto a step, so we can finally reach the place where we want to be – even if that place is not a conventional one that has anything remotely to do with a town or location. It may be a ‘feeling’ place that you end up in when you have made the right choice between, say, deciding to cook that night or to phone through for a delivery.
Right ends up being the smell of deep-fried pancake rolls which, incidentally, are currently being cooked up in your imagination before you have even dialled the number, as opposed to the smell of dishes pining to be washed, weeping because they are going to suffer neglect overnight, because you didn’t want to cook in the first place. Making a voluntary decision to indulge in ‘trans fatty acids’ and ‘hydrogenated fat’, avoiding any threat of catching the ‘kitchen blues’ is a choice you freely made and, whilst unchallenging, will have been highly emotive.
I didn’t feel ‘well’ at work today so my boss gave me three choices: I could leave the office and work from home, in the peace and quiet; come in at the weekend and make up my hours; or take the time off unpaid. So, I have three choices and none of them really appeal. One of them has to be chosen because I am under a contractual agreement to work! When I get home will I want to go to bed because I feel ill? When I feel better at the weekend, I may not want to work. If I don’t work then I won’t get paid! I decide not to get paid, draw a line under the situation and start the next week feeling all refreshed. I made a choice. I probably made one that meant I had to postpone my shopping plans; I would have to write a longer to-do list at work on Monday and draft up a few apology emails in the process to appease my customers.
All in all… a choice had to be made. Any residual impact requiring my attention will surface at a later date and this is a chance I was willing to take at the time. I must have carried out an instinctive risk assessment in my head, no doubt based on feeling under the weather at the time, but if there was a sense of urgency to tackle a life-threatening piece of work, I am certain I would have chosen differently.
We do what we do at the time! Whatever those influencing factors turn out to be, appearing on our radar, leading us into temptation, they flaunt themselves momentarily. They may appear as a flash of inspiration or distraction, arriving at an opportune moment, no doubt designed to lead us to behave in one way or another; think in one way or another. Choices must present themselves for a reason or do they present themselves because it is inevitable that there will be more than one option to take in any given situation? There have to be two in the very least: what you choose to do and what you choose not to do!
If we really do have ‘free will’, and manipulating each step along the way to fit our shoe size is as important as creating the path that will go the distance, then choices are something that can be met with a degree of excitement. After all, we are making history. We are being responsible for our own life and taking ownership. We can view the choice as an opportunity to change direction, make a new plan or walk away and let fate make a choice for us. We may think we have chosen to do nothing but we chose all the same.
Leaving it all to fate could work too – is that what I am doing when I send my request off to the Universe? I like to credit myself with doing some of the hard work too. It takes courage to do something with your dreams and make things happen in your life. I am inclined to add that remaining positive and hopeful are both key players, and even if I am one of those people who has a little faith in that postman in the sky, it doesn’t seem to protect me from actually having to still make choices. I just have to choose how big that dream is going to be and then set about making it happen.
Suppose we make a choice, still using our free will, and realise in the seconds that follow that we made a mistake – even though it felt right to us at the time. It may only take a second to come to this conclusion; yet, in some cases, it can take us years to pick up the pieces. But we can end up getting a lot of other things right, later on in life, as a result of making that one poor judgement. It is difficult to see any correlation until the benefits catch you up and put a smile back on your face. Their staggered appearance along your stretch of path proves deceptive but begins to make more sense as you do a few laps on the way. Circular detours can give your other ideas time to develop.
Remember, your handful of mixed seeds is varied and it is only through discovery and exploration that we learn. If you make a poor choice and the opportunity comes around full circle, inviting you to make a similar choice again, you can choose wisely with an added dose of that delightful word: hindsight. Serendipity is around every corner – you just don’t know where or when it will strike.
Your choices are interpreted by an audience, at one time or another, every single day. These are the virtual players that have all the answers, but don’t actually get the same opportunity to put them into practice, because your world and theirs are not the same. The sports fan that watched the game and confidently told everyone how it should have been played from a comfy spot that didn’t necessitate any need for movement – other than the mid-air rise to reflect their anguish or a triumph – is the virtu
al player and observes the choices made in the field.
A jury that has not been privy to all the facts, and is certain to form an opinion about a choice you have made recently, as a result of eavesdropping inappropriately or basing their ideas on hearsay (or evidence), will form part of the silent jury that sit among us. Whether they are watching you buy your spring rolls or eating your cheesecake our choices may be seen from afar and judged.
What you see through your eyes, as being the best way of doing something, may not work in practice for someone else. I suppose in this case, you will choose to agree or disagree. It would be a shame to invest all your energy in making a decision and not expect it to do what you had hoped, wouldn’t it?
H*O*P*E
Bridging the Gap
If you go to all the hard work of making something happen in your life, wouldn’t you expect it to work out, or do you take the stance that (whilst it would be great if it did) it is unusual for everything to work out – just because you hoped it would?
Surely it is OK to have expectations even though we may run the risk of them letting us down. You start out believing, with all your heart, that the expected something is going to work out or why would you do it? If there was an element of risk being involved, then it would make sense to hang on to Hope – with dear life; although, hoping alone gives me the impression that there could be a lack of confidence lurking behind the scenes. What if you are uncertain that what you are doing will really work out because Expect has clearly lost its nerves, relying on Luck to saunter in and save the day. Alarm bells are ringing – who needs who and why?!
Emotional Sandwiches Page 5