Decisions, decisions
Just choose
A quick reminder that my book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures comes out May 6! Click here to preorder:
I can’t decide what to write today. Last week was a big one here at the Lizzie Wade Weekly, and I hadn’t really thought beyond it. I’ve also been traveling some more. I’ve barely been at home since early December, and the discombobulation has finally caught up with me. If I learned anything from finishing my book, it’s that my writing flourishes in the soil of routine. It was past time to escape that routine and have different kinds of experiences, and I’m glad I did. But the idea well replenishes best with some stillness.
It also replenishes with consistency, however, and so here I am, making a decision about what to write. “Any decision is better than no decision,” is something I read this week, in this interview with decision coach Nell Wulfhart. She offers one-hour consultations in which she’ll make a hard, or at least intractable, decision for you. Her tagline is “Your therapist won’t tell you what to do, but I will.”
Wulfhart is the first to admit that most of the time, people already know what they want to do, and she’s usually providing the “permission slip.” Sometimes there is a right and a wrong decision. But usually, the power comes from the act of choosing, and the action the choice then inspires and requires.
I came to live by a version of “any decision is better than no decision” as I desperately finished my final draft. I had so little time that the only way forward was to stop doubting and second guessing and start just going for it. I don’t necessarily believe in “first idea, best idea,” but I do believe that I won’t find the best idea without simply getting started, and there’s no better place to start than the first idea.
But after making so many decisions, first about the book, and then about organizing my days when traveling, I also relate to another piece of the interview. Wulfhart is asked about “the most picayune problem” a client has asked her to solve. “What color should I paint my kitchen?” she says:
I was surprised that somebody would pay me to help them with that. But when I heard the situation, I was just like, “Oh, I get it.” Their house had caught on fire. She had been making decorating and renovation decisions for a full year, and this was the last one, and she had just run out of decision-making energy.
“She had just run out of decision-making energy.” That’s me right now. The little choices start to seem too big, and the big choices rear up to haunt me after it’s far too late to change them. The truth is, of course, “You can only control the decision,” Wulfhart says. “You cannot 100% control the outcome.” Was this the wrong newsletter to write? At this point, blessedly, it doesn’t matter.