Dilemmas and Decisions

I am always amazed by the amount of decisions people make each day. The mere daily act of getting out of bed and starting the day is ultimately a decision. We have the choice the stay in bed, be late to work or school, even not to show up, potentially losing a paycheck, or failing a test. It's each individual's choice. From there it's already what clothes to wear (life is easier in uniform in this case), what to have for breakfast, so on and so forth. All theses inner "dilemmas" go unnoticed most of the time. Our brains are trained to make decisions automatically. We don't register the fact that each one of our decisions, however small and seemingly unimportant, shapes the rest of our day, our week, and at the end of the day, our lives.

I know, it sounds heavy. And can drive a person crazy. When every step we take during the course of our lives suddenly has immense meaning, every step we take also becomes stressful and daunting. That's why our brains make most of the decisions for us. The hard decisions at the end of the day are the ones that our brains cannot make alone. Our hearts and intuitions pitch in with the process. 

Since I was a little girl, I have always been curious about people's stories. I have always wondered where the drivers in the cars next to me on the road are going, I have always wondered where the person sitting next to me on the bus is going to get off and who they are going to meet. I find it to be fascinating. It makes me wonder if our paths have ever crossed before, or if they will ever cross again. It's even more fascinating to me that every single one of the hundreds of people that each of us comes into contact with each day makes hundreds of decisions every day, and because of those decisions, our paths are now crossing. This reminds me of all the debates I had throughout my education about fate and free will. How much control do we actually have over the decisions we make and the outcomes of our dilemmas? When I was a little girl, I imagined G-d as someone up in the sky with billions of hands and a giant remote control, guiding our every move, and our every decision. Today, I see "G-d" as Martin Buber sees "G-d": a moment in time when an eternal connection is made with every living being on earth. "G-d" isn't a being, it's a giant crossing of paths. It's a moment in time that we are brought to as an outcome of the decisions we made to get there. Martin Buber calls this moment the "Eternal Thou" (from the book "I and Thou", highly recommended). I believe that this moment is completely and totally in our hands. The decisions that I make throughout the day are made not because the are meant to be made in some grand scheme of things. Rather, decisions are made because somewhere deep inside of each individual is his or her intuition, and intuition is not run by fate. It is only when I find myself in moments of "Eternal Thou", a grand connection with the world, that I validate the decisions that I have made. I know that I have stepped on the right paths up until now, even if at the time I stepped onto them, they seemed wrong.

So start each day by making the decision to get up and get out there. Hope that that's the hardest decision you will have to make that day. And find the giant crossing of paths. Who knows? Maybe you will even change the life of another decision maker out there...