Difficult decisions

I intended to publish another post today, but this one has somehow jumped the queue. (There is actually no queue, but but it’s handy to recall how to write the word ‘queue’ — ridiculous spelling isn’t it?!) Does this look like I am avoiding to write about difficult decisions?

OK, difficult decisions. That’s the topic. All of a sudden. All around me. Like a little mental pop up that doesn’t allow you to focus on the plan for the day. A crossroad, wrong turn, right turn, surprise destination… I planned to write ‘a portfolio’ of an extraordinary year in my life (coming soon), but this is what came out instead. A post about difficult decisions. As if I needed to emphasise that nothing good can start without a difficult decision.

I made one difficult decision last year, another over the weekend and who knows how many I will still have to make. One of my friends needs to make a big decision by the end of the year. Another friend feels that the time to make up her mind is creeping up too. She still hopes there will be no need to make that life changing decision, but yet, deep inside, she knows the curtain will rise sooner or later. And this is exactly why these decisions are called difficult, or tough — they are decisions that will significantly change your life (often when you don’t feel ready for that), and you don’t know how, and that is scary, isn’t it? Parting from what we know to move into unknown. And here we come to something that is so crucial to surviving burnout and moving on — it’s the ability to make a radical break. A radical break may mean many things, it may mean staying where you are as much as leaving everything, but it has to involve giving up something that is precious for something that is even more precious. Does this make sense?

And yup, it’s tough. You know that expression ‘just follow your heart‘? Often it’s not really that easy. Heart can be confused and confusing, it can be broken, it can be frozen, you might not be hearing it, it might take some time to decode the subtle messages of your inner being, or what you hear could be hard to accept. But even if not always easy, it’s so important to do it and it is liberating at the end.

Finally, a piece of good news for all self-flagellating procrastinators out there: what often looks like a procrastination in making a decision that feels tough, is actually giving time to yourself to feel and know what’s the most important to you, in which direction you want to grow, and then working through different layers of it until you craft the solution that feels right. So, it’s OK to ‘procrastinate’! Once you connect to that feeling of ‘This is it! This feels right for me!‘ it’s much easier to surrender and make the first step. And then, a new horizons start to open, and all other options that looked legitimate, start crumbling into a huge, and sometimes terrifying, but distant, irrelevant and almost inaudible avalanche, triggered by a germination of a single, beautiful flower of fragile, but unstoppable new life.

This week’s film suggestion: I am love, by Luca Guadagnino.

Please note that all photos on this blog belong to my personal collection with all rights reserved. If you are interested in licensing some of them, please get in touch.