"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears." -Rumi
Life can feel like 4-dimensional chess sometimes. A ton of variables combined with the unpredictability of the world around us, and before we know it, our mind goes tilt at the thought of the next step. "What if they do this?" "What if that happens?" "What if I don't like my decision?" "What if my life falls apart?"
It's easy to get buried under a mountain of hypothetical ifs. Ifs are like the mud spinning under your tires when you've drifted off the main road on a rainy night; you keep burying yourself in the spot you're trying to get out of. Stuck in inaction. Stuck in feeling like you need to move but unsure of what the next move should be. Ifs don't translate well into moving forward.
Being a perfectionist doesn’t make traversing this slippery landscape any easier. I'm constantly challenged by the feeling of wanting to have the entire course laid out, every potential detour and danger carefully identified and solved for before embarking. The issue here is that thinking you know what the road ahead will look like isn't the same as taking a step towards that unknown future. Og Mandino says this much better than me, “A map, no matter how carefully designed, will never carry its owner a single inch.”
What I seem to forget as often as I remember is that the only way to get clarity about where I think I'm heading is to take the first step in that direction.
More often than not, our anxiety is born of thinking we should have clarity about a future not yet present. So we put on our virtual reality headset, our minds, and attempt to play out all of the different scenarios with the millions of variables. Except play isn't the right word because we know that running innumerable calculations leads to a pounding headache and an existential fear that we actually have no idea what we are doing or where our decision is going to lead.
Alan Watts describes this decision-making process well in The Book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are:
“You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups. And people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration? And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite. So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. And then when the time comes to act, you make a snap judgment."
If we glance back at our previous decisions, we'll see this "strategy" replayed at every corner of our lives. The truth is, all of our decisions have been imperfect and a little impulsive and unsteady. Our challenge now is to remember that our first step in any new direction will always be that way and to relax in the remembrance that we've always adapted and figured it out. But we can't figure out what's next from where we are. Take the step.
