Choices

February 2, 2015

Greetings from the pondering,

“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!” ― Mark Twain

I sat in the parking lot waiting for something to click.  I am sure if anyone had been watching they would have been amused at the faces I was making, and the fact that once in a while I was talking out loud to myself.  I stared out the windshield, and took a deep breath and sighed.

Like all of us, I am faced with choices throughout the day.  Some are trivial, some carry greater consequence.  When I find myself wrestling with a decision, especially when I am graced with the time to consider it, I go through the same process that we probably all do. 

Our decisions are formed with a blend of logic and emotion and environment.  We have our personal philosophies, our experiences, and in all likelihood a host of subconscious influences that we would deny to our friends.  For the most part, our choices are a sum of emotional reactions plus rational thinking plus the force of our circumstances, which often includes other people. 

All the pros and cons accumulate, sometimes in real lists on lined paper, sometimes in the ether of our conscious.  The elements of the decision line up and do battle, and when the skirmish is complete, sometimes there is a clear winner.  But many times it is not that satisfying.

Often our decisions are just momentum, the result of the choices upon choices upon choices that lead down a certain path.  A habitual way of making decisions, which usually serves us, but sometimes blinds us to what is possible.  Or we choose simply to choose, because a good decision now is better than a perfect decision ‘someday’.

We mix in thought upon thought. Rationalizations.  Consequences.  Compromises.  This is how it’s always been done, so somehow an answer will form.  Probably.

Sometimes the choices are clear and easy.  Just as often the answer is in a murky fog of ambiguity.  And so we put the subject to our tests:  What is best for me?  What is fair?  What is kind?  What would my heroes do?  How much does this matter?  Who will care in six months?  What is the cost?  How many calories?  Who else will this effect?

All of this, my experiences, my philosophy, my core values, probably influenced to a degree by what I had for breakfast, whirl around my decisions.  And then this feather floats down from where the angels wait, and settles on one side of the scales.

I stared out the windshield and felt the air cooling around me, heard the wind whispering around the glass.  My mind wandered from my dilemma. 

Along the roofline of the grocery store I noticed there was an owl.  Not a real one, it turns out: it was a molded facsimile.   Every thirty feet or so along the edge of the roof, there was another owl; I’m sure they have always been there but I hadn’t noticed.   Not decoration, I decided, but to intimidate real birds to keep them from roosting on the roof and fouling the building and the people going in and out.

I followed the roofline the length of the façade, seeing these stern guardians with their identical owl-scowls.  And there, in the long stretch between two corners of the building where the owls stood watch, there was a row of pigeons, perhaps twenty interlopers, huddled together in a tight line.  I don’t know if smirks can form on beaks, but the implication was there.

My mouth was open in a smile.  It was as if someone had created a New Yorker cartoon and left off the caption for me to fill in.  “We’ll wait here until someone sees the irony in this.”

And then I laughed harder than the moment called for.  I laughed until tears formed, and I was breathless.  I rubbed my eyes and sighed again.  And what followed was this perfect moment of clarity, when choices fell into place among choices and the scales tipped.

Perspective comes to me in so many ways, but none better than this.  All of the logic and lists of pros and cons and reasonable thinking goes into the decision recipe.  And then there is this wafer thin effect that tips you in one direction.  It might be some random thought, or a ray of sunshine.  A sign.  It could be plastic owl that reminds you that life is funny. 

Sometimes when I look back at enough good decisions I can almost convince myself that I am smart, or that I learn from my experience.  And maybe that’s true to a degree.  But the part of me that still feels like an imposter in the adult world thinks otherwise.  In that odd moment in the parking lot, I realized I was laughing at myself.  My choices were far easier when I stopped taking myself too seriously.  There is a certain symmetry in getting that kind of wisdom from an owl.

Hope this finds you flipping a coin,

David

Copyright © 2015 David Smith