CHOICES

There are many interpretations to the concept of choice. One that is not mentioned in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is that choice often requires a decision to be made. decision: a determination after much consideration. Thus, I began to deliberate on the effects and reasons needed to consider when a choice is made. One must always remember that a decision/choice made should never be followed by the words, "I should have." 'Should have' may be used only in service of avoiding the same wrong choice in the future.

There are few un-ambivalent choices. There is usually a pro and a con to all. When I offer to do someone a favor, involving what I assume is merely a bit of my time, it never fails for that time to expand as soon as I agree. Murphy's law states, "Anything that can happen, will!" If you choose take someone to a doctor for a routine, 'brief appointment', you may quickly learn the doctor was bitten by a patient while examining her throat and is on his way for a tetanus or rabies shot. You are then told appointments are behind by an hour, and all the while you are seated in the only empty seat in the entire waiting room, next to a patient who is sneezing without a hanky, nose dripping, coughing all over the only magazine in the room you might have read. Even though you scheduled a brief trip, time flows into your committed time, on which your entire future depends on your being there on time.

Choice should be given as a course early in life. Wait a minute, it is!
Having, for years, fallen for the line, "This will only take a minute." I have come to know that these people are using a different clock...more like the one Christians use when they claim that the world was created in 8 days. I have chosen to divide my day up to things I have to do and things I'd like to do. Procrastination seems to straddle both. Then the war between the two factions starts. The only carrot that allows me to pay my bills on time (when I can find them) is that paying late fees and service charges equates to flushing my money down the toilet. I do not choose to do that.

Fixing someone's computer generally falls into a category of my choice gone wrong because anyone who would ask me must, by definition, know little about computers, what they are about, and how much time is involved in cleaning them out, updating stuff, and fixing minor problems. These are often the same people who insist they have brown thumbs and plants always die in their house. They somehow fail to understand that plants are living things that need to breathe, drink water, have enough space to live in, seek light as befitting their station in life, and occasionally get some food with the water. Why people insist on putting plants in direct sunlight whose natural habitat is on the floor of the rain forest, escapes me. More bad choices, also known as innocently uniformed. All people who choose to adopt plants should pass a horticultural competency test.

Choices come in two flavors: informed and uniformed. People who choose divorce as a first option to solving a problem seem to prefer the ' jump from the frying pan into the fire' method of problem solving. Those men who are in mid-life crisis and choose to marry a woman of childbearing years, start a new family, also fall in the poorly informed group since no man in that predicament would ever dare to tell another they had made a mistake. It is not a better experience the second time, especially when you overhear grandmothers wishing their husbands would push the little angel grandchildren like that one on a proud stroll.

So you see, we all make choices, some good and others not so good. It would be nice to think that those who chose to vote for Bush have now come to realize it was a bad choice. However, some do not even recognize a bad choice when they make a very obvious one. Apparently denial also makes one think they made a good choice when it was a bad choice. Those into projection make the bad choice YOUR bad choice, though you may not have had any part of it. Voting is a choice that more resembles gambling....but that is another long esssy.

DECISION MAKING

Too many people try to make decisions when they lack the critical data with which to do it. Decisions can be made rapidly when the reasons, pros and cons and consequences of it are clearly understood and factored into the predictable outcome. Blink a book by Malcolm Gladwell. who also wrote The Tipping Point, is described by its author as: "It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good."

"You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking." In "Blink" I'm trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?"

Quoting Dragnet's Sgt. Friday I'd add that decision making is about rapidly going through a set of internal criteria and making a judgment. It is said that information speeds from one hemisphere to another faster in women's brains. There are theories around this in terms of possible evolution because of the need to protect their children. Who knows? If that is so, there are still lots of women who just can't seem to make their minds up. This suggests another interference from making the decision. It might be 'Whom will I displease?' or, 'If I hold back, a better offer might come along.' There are others who procrastinate in decision making because of their own denial. 'What you don't know, you don't have to deal with.' 'Put it off definitely and people will forget about it', or, 'If I wait long enough, someone else will have taken care of it'.

The saying, 'Those who hesitate are lost.' should not come as news to anyone of this generation. Many great opportunities are missed in life by this avoidance of decision making and procrastination in snapping onto opportunities. In 1982, Johnny Rutherford won the Indianapolis 500. Someone suggested that he was lucky. His comment was, "Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet." Our youth has not had the good fortune of excellent education that generations before had available. We are 25th in a 30 nation evaluation, it was reported on the Tim Russert show, 4/27.

However, lest someone thinks that one must always make a hasty decision, one must be aware the decision must be hasty and well-thought out. It is also as imperative that correct decisions be made. Sometimes that is as difficult to do as deciding which fork of the road to take when both are unfamiliar as to where they will lead.