The image of a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. I watched a lot of cartoons where your conscience was portrayed this way. To a five-year-old raised in a world with black and white televisions and only three stations, what I saw on TV was truth.
All cartoons and dramas on TV had easy to understand ethics. Good and evil were clearly delineated. The white hat guys always won. Lessons were taught in thirty minutes. Sometimes, in sixty minutes. Never a doubt.
That’s the paradigm I grew up with whenever I thought about the life. Pretty black and white. Right and wrong. Good. Bad. Virtuous. Evil. Heaven. Hell. I imagined this was what the spiritual life was all about.
Do this,
Don’t do that.
Follow the rules. Right and wrong. As I grew older, that simplistic view became problematic. Life wasn’t always black and white.
Or, is it?
A decision is always influenced by past decisions. And the older you get, the more past decisions you’ve made. The more times you decide when an exception to the rule occurred. Decisions where extenuating circumstances confuse the decision. It’s never just black and white.
Really?
Binary Decisions
I like the simplicity of nudges. We either do something, or we don’t. Nudge. Or decide not to nudge. There is no other possible action in this universe.
As a famous alien movie star once said, “Do or do not. There is no try.”
We make hundreds of choices every day. And, every choice comes down to a yes or no. That’s it. It is that simple. No problem or question that cannot be reduced to a response of yes or no.
Since the most complex issues can all be stated in yes/no terms, we might conclude that all life is moved by nudges, simple yes/no responses to every moment in our lives. Only answering a question with yes or no won’t get us anywhere.
We need to be the ones asking the questions. Here’s the real challenge for all of us, “How do we ask the right questions?” And, how do we know a right question from a wrong question?
Where do I begin?
What do I feel?
How do I begin?
I’m lousy at seeing the big picture. How can any of this help me? What am I trying to accomplish? My family and friends don’t think I know what I’m doing. I’m scared about this. What do I do next?
Do I want to figure this out?
Yes or no?
And there it is.
A reduction to a yes/no question. Many questions, feelings and facts happened before this question. And yet all of the questions, feelings, and facts were reduced to this yes/no question.
If you can embrace this mindset of decision making, you will free your mind from the confusion of holding several different possible future outcomes in your mind at one time. You are also free from the expectation that you can resolve it all by thinking harder or longer or deeper.
Perhaps you have been caught in analysis paralysis at some point.
The catch-22 situation of just needing a bit more information to make the absolute correct decision.
I’ve been there. Thinking that at some point, I’ll have enough information that it will become crystal clear how to proceed. I will focus more intently. I can do it. Just give me a little more time. No way this could ever be reduced to a yes/no question and answer.
Even with 256 bits of random information, here’s the truth of the situation, you can ask eight questions and reduce your whole conundrum to one yes/no question.
The yes/no nudge.
Nudge: What’s the most difficult decision you have ever made?
Nudge, nudge: If you had to make that decision again, how would you think differently?