A curious and delightful experience

Am I alone or has this happened to you too?

Things are going well in life, you feel like you are on an even keel, all is well. And then, along comes a situation which puts you at a crossroad. You could go left of you could go right, there are pros and cons for each option, but the more you think about it the more you find yourself spinning and the balance you felt is replaced with oscillating between yes and no and back again.

This is how I have often felt about making decisions in the past. Whether it was around work opportunities, investing money, buying a house, a night out with friends or what to have for dinner, I (more often than not) found myself in this inner turmoil called making a decision.

Until now.

Right at this moment my husband and I are sitting with a work opportunity he has been presented with and it is a strangely curious and delightful experience!

It is exactly one of those crossroad moments where he could say yes or he could say no and down each of those roads there are, what appear to be, pros and cons. The thing that is curious and delightful is that we both feel very relaxed about it. It doesn’t feel like the “big decision” that it might have felt just a few months ago.

So, what’s different?

The truth is there is nothing fundamentally different. Our circumstances have not changed; our financial position is no different, our family situation is stable, we are both well and our relationship is in a good place. And yet it feels very, very different to be sitting in this space of not knowing which way to go and to be enjoying the experience at the same time.

Let’s slow down for a moment. What is really going on here?

• What if this is not actually about making the decision? 
• What if it really doesn’t matter whether he says yes or no? 
• What is there is something else going on?

Making a decision has often felt like a onetime deal to me, something to commit to and to get right.

I remember many hours weighing up the benefits and consequences of moving to London, of becoming self-employed, of ending a relationship and many other decisions over the years. Yes, there have been some decisions that have been easy to make and where there was very little thought required such as buying my first flat and getting married.  Sometimes there is no crossroad there is just the path ahead. But more often than not being faced with decisions has activated a part of me that feels it needs to have all the variables worked out and have a plan mapped out leading to a clear outcome that I could visualise.

With this opportunity Dan has been presented with we find ourselves at a crossroad and whilst (unlike saying yes to his proposal!) there isn’t a clear yes at this moment, the key difference is that we have a deep sense of peace that whatever decision he makes, all will be well. And that feels liberating!

It feels so light and joyful to be free from the pressure to make the right decision and to enjoy being in the experience of choosing. 

That is the key difference - being in the experience of choosing.

Being with the possibilities and the potential of each option without needing to work anything out. Being ok with not knowing how things will unfold. Being willing to make a choice with something other than reason, logic and rationale. (I didn’t make the decision to marry Dan with reason, logic and rationale and that has worked out pretty well for us over the past 16 years!).

When it comes to this work opportunity, and frankly it could be any decision, we are not trying to work it all out in our head or on paper.  Past experience has shown that this is futile because the factors that influence a decision made today may be entirely different tomorrow as the world around us changes moment by moment. Instead, we are sitting in the feeling of what it would be like to say yes and what it would be like to say no. We are allowing ourselves to be guided by the deep sense of what is important to us and how we want to experience life. 

Instead of fixating on the details (i.e. what the job looks like, where it is, what Dan will be doing) we are paying more attention to the experience we want to have (i.e. will it be enjoyable, will it give him/us freedom, will it be fulfilling?). It’s all about looking in a different direction. Instead of looking for the clear picture of perfection we are turning towards a sense of the feeling of the experience. 

It's like when you have a day off and you the experience you want is to feel relaxed and switched off from work. What you do, how that day looks, could take so many different forms from sitting reading a book, to socialising with friends, to going for a run or cooking a nice meal. The physical form doesn’t really matter the choice of what you do is based on how you want to feel.

It’s about getting curious about how you want to feel first.  Asking - do I want to feel challenged, inspired, relaxed, happy, peaceful, energised, liberated or something else……?  And then, from a sense of that feeling, looking at the opportunity and noticing if it aligns with the feeling or not. The choice then becomes easy.

Will Dan accept the work opportunity or not? I don’t know but what I do know is that this has offered us a curious and delightful opportunity to let go of the belief that making decisions is hard and to discover what it is like to be ok with making a choice based on something other than logic and fact. And let’s face it, the biggest disappointments in life come when our plan and our expectations don’t deliver what we thought they would.

So, I’ll leave you with a question to reflect on:

Where in your life are you holding yourself hostage to making the “right” decision and what would it be like if you could let go of needing to know and simply chose the experience you want to have?