Decisions, decisions

LOTS AND LOTS

Do you realise how many decisions you make in a day? Here I am at the beginning of my day and I have already decided what to wear, what to eat this evening, what to do with my day, which emails to reply to and what to say - and what to write in my blog (I'm still doing that - every moment as I write). And those are the conscious decisions. There have also been several extremely trivial, almost unconscious ones - do I empty the cat litter now (we are looking after our son's cat), do I turn the light on (it's getting a bit dark), should I straighten David's towel for him - and so it goes on. Virtually everything we do every day is the result of a decision, whether conscious or unconscious - and so it goes all through life - even unto death. When and how we die is also the result of decisions we have made, whether conscious or unconscious. Even if we are killed in some sort of accident not of our making, at some point we made a decision that led us to be at that particular place at that particular time. So is there predestination, fate? Or do we bring it all on ourselves, albeit unknowingly perhaps.

"The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience." Deepak Chopra

Sometimes different decisions will actually get you to the same place anyway. As in the photo I took in Ventimiglia at the top of the page - you can go to Genoa via the autostrada (to the left) or via the coast road and San Remo to the right for example. Either way will get you to the same destination, but the journey will be a different one, both in how long it takes and in what you see. There is no correct way to go in this instance, your choice will depend on what you want to see, whether you want to pay the autostrada toll or not, how much time you have, and also, possibly, on what you are planning to do once you get to Genova. Is it just a landmark on the way or the final destination? The journey shown on the map above could involve several such decisions as the different routes criss-cross each other along the way, with some being almost identical.

“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.” Victor Hugo

The journey is a favourite literary metaphor, and it certainly applies to all the decisions big and small that we make throughout life, but we also do take actual journeys and they are full of decisions - even a trip to our local shops involves a few decisions about which route to take, or which car to take. And the decision we take possibly has something to say about who we are - David, for example, has a definite preference for one route there and back - I too have a preferred route, but I also like to vary it. Not sure what that says about us, but it is interesting to contemplate, as I am sure the choices we make are directly related to who we are.

But there are also those major decisions we make in life. The fork in the road. (Well this is supposed to be a blog about food related things and I seem to be straying at the moment.) An interesting picture, because there is a fork and yet there is no fork - there is only one road leading straight ahead. If only life were so simple!

But I won't talk much about the major decisions here. I'll leave that to Robert Frost's famous poem below. Suffice to say that even major decisions are often made with a degree of unconscious thought and accident. Who one marries for example is most likely simply an accident to do with who one knows at a particular time and place in your life.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

But I should return to food. This is supposed to be about food after all. Every morning, whilst I am still lying in bed, I decide more or less what I am going to cook for dinner, because this may involve me getting something out of the freezer and this would have to be done first thing. It may still only be a vague idea about what I cook though. That decision may be made later in the day when I check what I have in the fridge to supplement my main ingredient (or to be the main ingredient), or what I feel like doing when it comes to time to cook. As I cook I decide which pot to use, which knife to use, where to cut things up - heaps and heaps of tiny little decisions. What we eat makes us who we are - at least in a physical sense, although they are now beginning to think it also influences who we might be emotionally. And we are the ones who decide what we eat. Only the very poor in the world get no choice.

I really don't think I have added anything to the world in my musings on decisions - it just occurred to me how many I make each day. Does this cause stress or does it keep me mentally active? All I know is that there is no correct answer - so don't sweat about it.

And do animals make decisions too? They must do surely.