So many of us worry incessantly about making decisions. Should I stay in my job that I don’t like much? Should I end this relationship? Should I buy that new car? We waffle back and forth, going over pros and cons but nothing really settles our minds. Here is my radical proposal: You don’t actually make big decisions like that, they make themselves. Okay let me be clear about this. By the time you are actually wrestling with a decision it has likely already been made, and you are simply unaware that the decision has been put into motion by a series of small choices, (seemingly insignificant) you have made up to that point. These small choices set our feet on a particular path that grows narrower, leaving fewer and fewer alternatives until we reach a point of no return. At this stage there is only one choice left, the one that has made itself, or rather you made it unknowingly.
I find this notion calming and it re-centers me on what is really important: the little choices I make in the present moment. Each tiny choice, from how I speak to my neighbor to yelling at the dog, is a building block to a larger decision. A decision for which I will bear the consequences regardless of my lack of awareness. Each little choice matters IMMENSELY. If considered in this way, there are NO big decisions that are ever made, only a series of tiny ones.
The real decision I make is the day-to-day, moment-to-moment choice of being true to myself and my values or not. That’s it. I am either true to that or I am not. This determines everything else. There is nothing I can do that is unimportant or lacks consequences, no matter how small.
Of course, many things happen to us that we have no control over except for how we respond to what happens to us, and therein lies a great deal of personal power. It is in those quiet moments of response that the world is changed. I think of the life of Viktor Frankl who survived the terrible ordeal of imprisonment and forced labor at Auschwitz concentration camp. Each small choice he made led to one of the greatest and most influential books of the twentieth century, Man’s Search for Meaning. He tells of opportunities to escape, to enact revenge, to steal from another inmate and he faces each choice with the significance it deserved. Sometimes his small choices led to unhappy consequences and other times it led to hope and renewal. As a psychologist he noted how others’ small choices impacted the direction of the rest of their lives. It is in the small things that greatness is achieved. The big decisions are made day by day, minute by minute.
Whenever you are faced with what appears to be a big decision, relax. Look back over your life and notice all the small choices you have already made, notice the path that those choices placed your feet upon, notice the direction it led you and how your options, one by one, slowly disappeared. You will see that there is only one destination. You may not know what lies over the horizon of your future, but you can trust that it is the only way forward for you. You don’t have to worry about a thing. Just keep making your best choices every small step of the way.
Decisions Make Themselves
