How To Take A Decision

Let’s say you are driving your car and you are at the beginning of a long road. At the end of the road there is a junction where you can take a left or a right. Either way will take you to your destination.

Now, most people start thinking about the junction when they are at the beginning of the road. They want to make a decision before reaching the junction. To do this, they have to use their past experiences of both routes, assess them based on the experience of pain or pleasure and then decide on the final direction to take.

For example, they may choose right because last time they took a left, there was a lot of traffic. In this case, they want to push away pain and thus they decide on right. Or, last time they took a right and they did not go through a single signal. In this case, they want to recreate pleasure which makes them decide on right.

Almost all of this is happening subconsciously. One might not even be aware that they are doing this. Thinking takes up a lot more energy than we think it does. A lot of work is involved in thinking. So many memories have to be read, all the previous choices have to be assessed, their experiences have to be felt, aggregated, assimilated, in your own unique algorithm. And more the memory, higher the processing used. There’s almost never a clear winner. There’s a lot of back and forth as you assess the pain-pleasure feedback from both the options. It causes a some sense of anxiety, because you don’t exactly know which is better. You are worried you might choose the wrong route.

Instead of trying to make the right decision, you become worried about making the wrong decision.

You don’t want to feel like a fool. You don’t want to waste time. You have to get this right, somehow.

And in doing all this, they completely miss your car ride. they miss the music that’s being played, they miss the beautiful dog drinking water from a puddle on the road, they miss the crazy cloud formations in the sky. They are asleep. They are driving the car on autopilot. They are not present. The mind is not on the driving, the mind is on trying to make a decision.

Now, let’s say they somehow take a decision very quickly and they reach the junction and they follow the decision. Let’s say they take a right. And as soon as they go a little ahead, they find that there is a huge traffic jam on the road. Immediately the mind goes back to that junction and the planning that was done at the beginning of the road. Everything is shaken up. They feel as if they have taken the wrong decision. Now, there is an additional layer of guilt that’s added. The guilt of not taking the right decision.

Again they have gone away from the present. Again their thinking has taken over. The junction has already been crossed, the decision has already been taken and yet the thinking about it continues. They want to make sure that this is not repeated again and so the entire repository of this decision is again fetched and the current experience is merged into it.

It can also be a happy experience. They turn right and there is no traffic at all. It feels good to be right. It would still trigger thinking. They would want to reinforce the fact that they had a taken the right decision and that the way they arrived at it is also right.

Again, this is going to take up a lot of your energy. You are thinking before the decision and you are also thinking after the decision. And it can go on and on.

Don’t worry. There is another way. There’s another way to decide.
It’s the complete opposite of the other strategy. The idea is to allow the decision to happen. As they are driving the car, if instead of thinking about the route, they are enjoying the music and the scenery. The AC feels so good. It crosses their mind that they soon have to decide between left and right but they let it go. They don’t bother about it.

As the junction comes closer, the point at which the decision has to be taken also comes closer. And sometime before it has to be taken, the decision just pops up. You are forced to choose because you cannot keep driving straight now. The body just follows a feeling coming from deep within. They don’t know why they chose it. It really doesn’t matter actually because they are not worried about making the right decision. They are going to respond to whatever shows up. If they drive into traffic, they respond accordingly. They maybe make a few calls, or listen to something or just do nothing. It doesn’t matter because now they are responding to the traffic. They are not busy thinking about the decision they had taken.

Since there was no right or wrong discussion or assessment, the traffic is not viewed as wrong. It is just accepted as something that needs to be responded to. If there are any decisions to be taken, it is taken in exactly the same way. By not thinking about it but rather by letting it show up. If there is anything to be done, it just occurs to you to do that. Because they are not distracted by their thinking, they are in a better position to respond instead of react.