To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Friday, November 29, 2019
 
I have been super, super busy (as you can no doubt tell!)… and will be continue to be so for the next two weeks… my faithful readers would know that December is the time I go home… and yes, I am going home this time too! …but it means I have a ton of work to wrap up…so speeding to the finish is a priority for now…

Wrote the following a few weeks ago and forgot to post…maybe just as well! :)


I needed advice on a certain minor decision recently. I asked someone I look up to for it and they expressed confidence in my own ability to make the right decision. The problem was that I just didn’t know what the right decision was. I decided then to take one step which wouldn’t exactly materialise the event but it would set the balling rolling in a way that the decision would be taken out of my hands and would move into the field of ‘chance’. The other party could accept or reject at the next stage so it wouldn’t anymore be my decision so all I had done was to put the event within the domain of possibility, so to speak. Had I not take that one step it wouldn’t have moved into the field of possibility at all so it would in effect have been my decision to not make the event come about, but this way, I thought, I was simply giving both negative and positive possibilities an equal chance.

It seemed to me that by taking this approach I had essentially made the decision to trust God. If I hadn’t taken the step, it would be my decision to not let the event materialise. If I take the step, I am certainly giving the event a chance to materialise but only a chance because there are also many variables involved in this event materialising in my favour so if it did materialise or didn’t, it would no longer be my decision but God’s way of telling me that it was the right decision whatever it was. Rationalising in this way, I felt not only good about how I had handled the matter, I also felt that it allowed me to have a certain sense of detachment for the outcome. Had I consciously decided in favour of the event without it being in my complete control to bring it about and then had it not occurred because of some or the other variable going wrong, I would have been dejected. I would have felt that I wanted something and made an effort for it, and it didn’t happen. Whereas, in this scheme of things, I could tell myself that I am neutral to the outcome, and the outcome itself would determine my choice rather than my choice taking me toward an unpredictable outcome… essentially, whatever the outcome, it would be the one that I would think was good for me.

It seems to me that a lot of people perhaps go about decision-making in their lives in this way. The general rule being that whatever happens, happens for the best. If things work out, they were meant to, if they don’t, they weren’t. I think it allows one to become more Zen-like in one’s response to events where instead of feeling disappointed or miserable one simply feels that this might be for the best. You take every event or its materialisation/non-materialisation not as an event that you brought about or didn’t (and perhaps your detachedness in the process is key to seeing it this way) but as something that by its very materialisation or lack of it tells you whether it is good one way or the other…and whichever it is, is for the best.

Moving to the present, the event did materialise. I wonder if my relaxed attitude to the outcome and through the process actually helped bring it about… which would be paradoxical to say the least!

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 11:01 pm 0 comments
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