So what? What’s next? The next stem lies ahead of us, what’s the necessary action you are going to take in order to make life easier for you? Perhaps you don’t want easiness, you prefer to have challenges in life, that’s fine, but the question does still lie ahead. What are you going to do? It’s not like missing the point of life. Or maybe it is, I am not even sure. To me having a lost purpose is different than having to make a choice to determine the flow of time. This writing is more about the making choices in life where the outcome is uncertain beforehand.
As a someone in his early 20s, having a life to live (according to average human lifetime, but considering individual lifetimes may wary quite a lot there’s a chance that I may not have the said life; but in that case I have nothing to worry about) comes with lots of closed boxes, turns and twists. Those choices holding potential to completely change my future makes that decision making way more complicated and stressful. Maybe I am doing it wrong, maybe I shouldn’t worry about the future I yet to live and face. Perhaps I am worried about not the consequences, but “what if"s that consequences might lead me to. That seems more reasonable answer to me. I am worried about missing out, I am worried about not trying all the possibilities before moving onto the most secure option to try. Things get even more trickier if that “most secure option” may be something that’s not going to stay there for long. In case you’re wondering if there’s a “secure option” when making choices; at least for me I can make statistical decisions to decide on the most secure option for the moment. However, as a human being I can’t just rely on my rational thinking to keep me afloat. Why though? The times where I relied on emotions to make choices, most of the times the choice didn’t turned out to worth all the effort. Then I think, maybe I am resisting to taking emotions seriously, just because it led to more pain than positive outcomes. Maybe it’s the pain I am worried about. No matter how hard I try to ignore my emotions and make rational decisions, I can’t help my self but feel the numb on my head afterwards. No matter how ‘stupid’ my emotions have been, they helped me to shape myself to become the me of now. Without them I might have become an unbearable person for myself to deal with, or would I? Which one of them would be “the me” that I am referring to?
That all said, we need to make a choice. The time spent not making a choice, we make a choice of not taking any action. It is the worst choice of them all. No matter how thoughtful it may seem, we have to make choices if we deem a change in our life. Alternative is to sitting there, waiting for a miracle. I don’t have any tips on how to make such choices, sometimes I even try doing SWOT analysis for unnecessary choices, however most of the time we either lack data to complete the analysis, or the result doesn’t satisfy us enough to move on. Perhaps sometimes we have already made our choice, but just conflicting with ourselves, trying to change our mind into acting in certain way.
Having some long term plans may also cause that self-conflicting moments. When one has a thing in mind, and faces with another option that may steer them away from that goal, it may cause conflict of interest within a single body. At one point in life taking a risk and a sacrifice becomes a necessity to move on. There’s a catch tho, when making choices we may come to ignore a solid point, we may compare a choice with another one, without considering what the choice is deemed on. Maybe the long term plan we are holding onto does worth the sacrifice in comparison to the other choice. It’s worthwhile to not look into a plan as a “must be done” thing, rather considering it as a “current goal” that we may change as we go by. Sometimes it might worth giving up on goals and living the life spontaneously.
I really don’t know what’s the right way to deal with those stuff. All I know is I am just like all the other explorers trying to survive in this world, we are just wandering around, experimenting, learning from past failures and adjusting our ways to have “better future”. Good luck on your exploration! That’s all I got to say for now.