All Points Converge to Here

I was recently talking with a friend who is going though some big changes in life. She was sort bemoaning the size of the decisions she was making, the far reaching impact on her life, and being scared by the potential of screwing up. While assuring her she was on the right track, I developed another train of though in some parallel neural paths.

I got to thinking about all the really little "nothing" decisions that irrevocably changed my life; the passing comment that probably ended my relationship with my high-school girlfriend, stopping for Chik-Fil-A putting me on a collision course with the sleepy driver who almost killed me, and probably a million others that I don't remember.

It occurred to me that while you may be able to more easily predict SOME of the downstream consequences of a "big" decision, you can't really see very many of them at all. And most of us don't usually consider the downstream flow from what you did or didn't miss from the time you decided to stop for the extra cup of coffee on the way to work. Might have missed being hit by a bus crossing the street. Might have missed holding the office door for your soul-mate.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is that all your decisions are really the same size. They lead you down into a web of interaction with everything else that is far too complicated to ever predict. The sum of all of those decisions leads you to where you are right this very second, and where you'll be the next, and so on.

That being said, what I am trying to take away from all that is to not belabor the stuff that looks too big to deal with, and to not marginalize the hundreds of small decisions that I make every day. I need to keep that in mind as I sort through things right now. Move forward. Act consciously, but decisively. Everything I have ever done leads me to typing this post, right here, right now. And so will the next keystroke.