I’ve relied a lot on Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer’s five decades of studying how our minds shape our bodies and our lives. Decisions and hoping to make the best ones is a topic she is often asked about, and it appears in her writing also. If you’ve read any of my ‘gettin’ ready to act’ posts, then you know that a decision, almost any decision, might be the step towards meaningful action.
Langer has always said that science can only give us probabilities. It is up to each of us to make the choices, the decisions, and no matter how we agonize and strategize, we won’t really know.
We won’t know the outcomes until we make a move, right? She has always coached us not to go for that perfect ‘right’ decision. Rather, make a decision, and then make it right. And since her words have always lent me enough calm to move ahead, I turned to her again for clarity on this week’s decisions. This is the outcome.
The inciting insight
What else can I have been doing while dithering? Decluttering. In just a few of my Living (well) to Deadline posts, you know me well. It’s a necessity and preoccupation for me.
Each item I touch requires a decision. Beyond the trifecta of decluttering success, such as bins marked: Toss, Sell, Donate… there is still what we keep. And what we keep may outlive us. Then someone else will be burdened with decisions, and we won’t be there as the authority on any possession, including our creative work’s value.
Decluttering is an energy equation. Do it now as you decide or exhaust someone’s capacity to decide in a jumble later. EVERYTHING represents a decision, before, during or after its creation or purchase.
Writer’s skills applied: gathering and editing
I found solace in the parallel between Langer’s oft-repeated argument that we have learned that decisions require information gathering. Research. Check. We list the pros and cons. We choose the option that scores highest, right?
Let me pose this question, as a long-time writer/researcher and admitted information junkie in an age when the main fix came from periodicals and NEW information in newspapers: Where is the natural stopping point for information-gathering now? There are limitless opportunities to just look up one more fact. We can ask associates or AI for that one more opinion.
Plus, each of our pros and cons can be factual but also subjective. They are open to interpretation.
So, the sure thing, like a mythical prediction, is impossible.
The solution is just a flip away
The first time I heard Langer say, “Just pick something, anything, flip a coin if you have to.” I got the shakes. Scared to make a mistake, to be fooled, to lose time and to lose face, I recoiled. Still, the advice she sandwiched the suggestion with was to “put your energy into making the decision you made turn out well, instead of endlessly re-litigating whether you made the ‘correct’ one. Make it right. Enjoy the success or, if not successful, what you learn from it. I understand this as my self-determination to choose, make a decision according to my own rules, and to reap the feeling of accomplishment (and possibly relief).
Bringing it home
I have household and sentimental stuff. There are archives, books, and I am heavily invested in the work and the stories in my piles and files. Can you identify, eh?
There is stuff that is useful, if not to me anymore, then to others. I have trouble parting with it. I want it at least to go to a good ‘home’. Like all of us, I have sentimental stuff that might not make sense to keep. Like one earring of a pair, but I have a few of these missing pairs from different seasons of my life. A dangly wooden one from San Francisco (cue the song) on my first footloose visit between uni years. A mass-produced Coro clip on before I wore only handcrafted or heirloom pieces, based on my 25 years’ exposure as a publicist to a major annual craft event where I appreciated the value of artisanal work. And so on….
I pick up a piece, turn it over and reminisce. I put it back exactly where it was.
That is not decision-making. That decision to delay is not fulfilling in the long term, as its ugly cousin’s accusatory label rears its head: procrastination.
Career, clutter and cause for action
One day that pile of stuff won’t be my problem. It will fall to whoever is in charge of my estate, such as it is. They will have to decide in a few seconds what, if anything, they are holding means something.
They will not have my decades of context. What they will have is their own life and work and possibly a plane to catch to get back to it.
The lesson is in the question: why outsource decisions? Why wait for someone to deal with what’s left?
Decide now and adapt as you go. In the case of stuff accumulated, all the popular experts, from minimalists with podcasts to that nice Swedish lady and her surprisingly short and uplifting book on death cleaning, or your career coach, all say that same thing.
First, the declutter gives you energy now and is a future gift to your friends, family or executor who may need to deal with it all.
Next and foremost, every item is a decision made that allows you to evolve, grow and edit out what does not serve you. You don’t actually HAVE TO make the right decision: keep, trash, donate or even photograph it as a means to let go. Just make a decision and make it right by moving on constructively and living well with it, rather than second-guessing and being stuck forever.
Edit and live the version you have created.
I’m choosing to BE the one who decides. Even about the earring(s).
For more in the series on Living to Deadline and what happens when you are making room for the future while drawing on seven decades of life to get you there: subscribe. It’s free. Also feel free to comment.
