Your Choices Only Need to Fit Yourself
Carolyn Hax had a column a few weeks back with a wonderful little nugget towards the end of her answer. The situation was about a cheating ex-boyfriend and whether a leopard changes spots. The person states they are cautiously moving forward with trying again.
I actually think you’re wrong to be cautious. “Cautious” implies something can be done safely.
Some things are dangerous. Like mountain-climbing. You don’t tiptoe up, hoping the mountain has changed. You go into it knowing what you can and can’t control, equipped to handle the worst …
Anyway. If you’re not equipped for danger, then stick to lounging poolside. No shame in that. The value in any choice is not absolute; it’s in how well you know yourself, and how well your choices suit you.
There’s a lot of good in there including accepting situations for what they are vs. what we want them to be. But the line that got me was “The value in any choice is not absolute; it’s in how well you know yourself, and how well your choices suit you.”
These are not choices that affect other people—for instance, and I’m just pulling this out of my ass, COVID-19 choices. Those choices, such as mask-wearing or staying home or taking this seriously, affect everyone else. That’s sort of a defining feature of a pandemic. It spreads. And it spreads due to human choice. If we all stayed home as the CDC has asked us to stay home, we could have stopped this from reaching the levels it has reached in the US.
But that is another post.
These are choices that affect only the people who need to live with the choice. Such as whether to follow a certain career or marry a certain person or build a family. Of course, there are other people who claim your choices affect them because your choice changes their relationship with you. But no one is owed another person following the career path they’re trying to impose (except, perhaps, the royal family) or marrying a person that meets someone else’s criteria or providing grandchildren; no matter how much we really wish the people around us would make a different choice that would make us happier.
I like that idea—the only value in a choice is how well the choice suits us. If the choice doesn’t actually suit the person, it isn’t a good choice for them. Choices, in and of themselves (except for masks and staying home), don’t have value.
1 comment
That’s good advice – one of my online friends made a difficult choice, and I find myself evaluating how well that’s working for her based on the things she says. I don’t think she saw a different way, and I think she hoped that it would be right for her. But I don’t know if she realized how deeply she had been struck by the events leading up to the choice.