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choices

Jeeps and Aspens and Now, Now, Now

A wonderful conversation with a good friend this morning led me to a moment of deep celebration that I want to share with you.

Julia told with me that she was feeling a bit frustrated with herself because she is clinging to her old Jeep, which is beginning to show its age. It is costing her more and more money to keep running and her friends are encouraging her to get rid of it. She is loathe to part with it because it is a symbol of independence and freedom for her and has been with her since a particularly wrenching part of her life. She and her Jeep have had an eventful, productive journey of growth together and I suspect she may have a bit of fear that her growth will stop if she lets it go. Like many of us, her life today is not exactly where she had thought it would be and she is yearning for more stability. Her Jeep has been providing some of that stability for her for quite a while.

Her feelings make perfect sense to me and I stumble around a bunch trying to offer her support. I tell her the story of my beloved dog, Conan, who I thought could somehow live forever, and of course could not. I offer her a scrap of Buddhist wisdom by reminding her that our own personal actions are the only thing we actually get to take with us when we leave this dance… that all the rest of it will fall away. I suggest that maybe the best comfort for her right now is to hold open her mind to the possibility that her Jeep will leave one day in a way that will feel all right for her.  I even joke that she could share her story of devotion and loyalty with the Jeep Company and perhaps they will step up and restore her loved one. I don’t know if any of this actually helps her. I hope she is comforted by my efforts, which are perhaps the best any of us can ever offer to any one: our clear desire to be of help, human beings reaching out to one another.

Then I head to my regular Friday morning “church” meeting and Julia begins helping me.

For many happy months I have been spent my  Friday mornings sitting in the upstairs window of Truckee’s “For Goodness Sake” and listening as recordings of  Abraham-Hicks pour truckloads of wisdom into my heart and soul. I first sat there in the fall, when the Aspens outside were in their quaking, glorious, golden colors, and I was captivated by the light shining through them. Throughout the winter I entertained myself watching the light play with the snow, the roofline of the rail yard buildings, the rail tracks themselves. Today, I am delighted to see that last week’s swollen buds have given way to tiny, perfect, new Aspen leaves, and the quaking has begun again.

And I am even more delighted to see that my buddy, my companion for the winter is still there. One dead leaf from last fall has hung on all of this time and has become a little symbol of stability for me. Like Julia’s jeep.

I say hello to my leaf and introduce him to Lorrie, who has never known just what I have been looking at all of these months.  She doesn’t blink and eye when I explain what he means to me and I am so pleased by her open acceptance of me.  She gets me.

I sit and greet the leaf and all of the other familiar sights and let the learning begin to flow in. My eyes wander from the swirling late spring snowflakes to the patterns of the dripping water on the cars below and then back to my leaf. Suddenly, I realize that one day I will sit here and my leaf will be gone and that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.  Months of wind, water, ice and snow could not do what will be completely, easily and naturally done by the arrival of a new, little leaf pushing its way out of the tip of the branch. I am breathless at the beauty of this, and overcome with gratitude to Julia for helping me to see it while my leaf is still here.  My stability is just as fragile as hers and my companion will leave me as well. I am so happy to have this morning and to see my leaf one more time, to be reminded that the joy is here and now, now, now. All I can do is celebrate the months of happiness this tiny, graceful reminder of life and strength and persistence has given me. Next Friday the branch might be empty, the leaf gone forever from my sight… but nothing can ever take the memory from me.

And nothing can ever really take your Jeep from you, Julia.

It has been about four years since I first wrote this post, and many leaves have come and gone on my tree. Still remembering….)

Overwhelmed with Choices

I see it in my son’s face and I recognize it completely because I know the feeling. It is panic, and it is there because someone has told him (maybe me!) that he gets to be and do anything he wants in his life.

“Anything” is a lot of things. All of them, in fact. How can you pick the right one?

When we are children, it is a common question to have the adults around us ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It seems pretty harmless, and as children we are usually allowed to try different answers to the questions as often as we want. One day we want to be a truck driver, the next day a nuclear physicist. The pressure is not yet on.

All that changed for me when I entered young adulthood… and that is what I recognize in my son’s eyes. Being smart and capable means you could do a lot of different things. So how do you choose the right one? The stakes seem so high!

http://amzn.to/2zf0wDqReading Chris Anderson’s book,  The Long Tail, shed some light on this issue of choice in a whole new way. In part, this book is a discussion of what happens to consumers and their buying habits when the number of choices they have grows. Today, as you no doubt know, the rise of the internet is giving us more choices than we have ever had before. Marketers and salespeople study us consumers like mad, trying to understand how we make those choices so they can influence our purchasing decisions. This is where my “Aha!” came in.

When shoppers are presented with too many choices, it turns out they often don’t buy anything at all. They freeze and go into overwhelm, kind of like me and my son when asked to choose from so many possible lifetime occupations. So, maybe too much choice is a bad thing. Maybe sellers should just limit choices and keep everyone calm. Maybe they should just choose for you.

Except most of us don’t like that either. We know we have the right to run our own lives and we protest lack of choice vigorously. “Don’t tell me what to do! You are not the boss of me!”

Thankfully, there is a way across the minefield. The answer? Offer us helpful ways to make our choice when there are many options. Recommendations, filters, ratings and a variety of ways to categorize options: all of these are techniques to help us choose, and all of them are the specialty of the internet.  Looking at a shelf stocked with 1500 different kinds of breakfast cereal can cause us to give up altogether and just decide to stick with pancakes. But give us a lot of ways to sort it all out (gluten-free? lightly-sweetened? best-selling?) and our confidence to make a choice that we will be satisfied with grows.

After reading this information, suddenly I see a new way to understand the reaction  my son (and I) feel to that age-old question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I now understand the potential impact of guidance counselors, personality inventories, mentors and internship programs. These are all ways to filter the choices, increase our comfort levels and grow that confidence that we can find a good fit for our unique talents.

This is not revolutionary news. Most of us encourage our kids to explore and try a few different life areas because we want them to choose something they are happy with. However, knowing that there is decision-making light at the end of the tunnel, this mom will be encouraging that exploration in a much more conscious way than before.