Decisions

Life is full of decisions.  Cornell researchers have found that people make over 200 decisions PER DAY just regarding food!

Most days we make mundane decisions with barely a thought: when to get out of bed, when to go to the bathroom, when to sneeze, when to go to bed, what store to shop at. Even what foods we buy and which clothes in our wardrobe we wear become routine. The choice becomes less of a decision than a habit. As choices become habits, they barely get our cognitive attention, because they are rote. When we decide to change a behavior, decisions that are usually rote come to the front of our consciousness and receive more profound attention.

This, I believe, is why change is so emotionally taxing.

When we decide to change ONE thing in our lives, it disrupts our routines. Many mundane or rote decisions must get more of our cognitive attention, thereby creating more decisions. What in the routine of life is a foregone conclusion must be decided in a new way when our lives are sent out of order. This, I believe is the case when someone decides to do anything different be it deciding to diet, add an exercise routine, or even just join a new group or club. But enter a BIG change - moving or job change, a new child or a marriage - and your life is sent into a new gear. Additional choices are required while our brains reset to our "new normal."

It's been six weeks now that I've not been working. Job change is a BIG change, I believe. I've developed a routine by accident in this time and find that I'm not exactly using my time as I would prefer. I love the structure that routine affords me, and I find myself adrift when it's lacking. So the one decision - to quit my job- leads to a plethora of decisions I wasn't anticipating.

I have to remember that I'm not stuck. Be reminded that my new, albeit accidental, routine is not set in stone and decide to DECIDE on how my time will be spent, what my priorities are and how I will choose to invest my energies. Today I'm deciding to decide.

Happenstance isn't a choice. Serendipity is foolish. But choosing has both intrinsic and incidental rewards. So today I'm resetting. Renewing. Re-deciding.

The Once and Future Worker

It feels a bit like purgatory, to be between jobs. Held in limbo between what a specific investment of energy and the unknown Next. Looking for work is it's own special kind of hell. Requiring a prostration that other forms of self inquiry do not, because looking for work requires one's critical self-inventory to become public. That self-inventory is dusted off, shook out, polished within an inch of it's life, then presented to unknown authorities for their acceptance or rejection.

Several times yesterday Elliott told me I was "ruining his rep." Really? I wonder, how does one go about ruining a 6 year old's rep? Sigh.


Since two days ago, I found myself without a job, I too have been concerned about my "rep". It was my decision to resign, but I wasn't expecting it to play out as it did. Leaving for reasons other than another job make the "why are you applying" questions that much more difficult. And make the particular part of purgatory I'm in feel hotter, more intense.

So here I go, self-inventory and reputation in hand, to discover if in an employer's eyes my reputation is still intact. And (although this may be overly melodramatic) thereby to be released from purgatory.