The Challenge With Choice

 The average human makes approximately 35,000 decisions every single day!

If you have been friends with me and/or following my blogs (including my historical ones -as I have been blogging since about 2013), you will know that today is not the first time I have written about choice. Nor am I the only one-here's a fave TedTalk worth listening to: The Paradox of Choice. It is also not the first time I have written about the search for the proverbial unicorn career or making all the puzzle pieces fit. If you have no idea about puzzles and unicorns, just ignore for now. 😘

Our choices define us. Our choices point to what matters to us. Want to know someone better? Watch the choices they make. Every choice may lead us somewhere different and has the potential to greatly change the course of our ENTIRE life-think of the butterfly effect or the movie The Adjustment Bureau (GREAT movie).

Obviously some choices are much more important than others. For example, the outfit I have on today, the lunch I ate, the choice to sit and blog...these choices are probably much less important to my overall path of life than my choice of faith, my choice in a spouse, my choice to parent. 

I once read a stop-me-in-my-tracks quote that said. "You can do anything, but not everything."  

For someone like me, I want to vehemently resist this. I LOVE having options! The world is so big and there are so many things, places, people, CHOICES I want to explore.

 I think I drive my family nuts when I make decisions. I start with a few viable options. Let's say with cars, since I am in the process of making a change to get better gas mileage than my beautiful, gas guzzler. I might list a few makes and models I like. Barrett will then (in a gallant attempt to help), start looking for only those makes and models I mentioned. I will then expand my search bringing in similar makes and models, maybe going from 3 choices to 12. I will then research all 12 and then re-narrow my field of options. I do this with travel, with job options, with homes when we were looking. It is a type of inductive reasoning where you move from a few specifics to broader generalizations. Then I re-focus. I look at the pros and cons (no unicorns for cars either haha!). I am a big picture person who then zooms in. 

A problem I sometimes have is that I might take awhile to make a decision, and then I might circle back around and chew on the information some more. This can make me seem flaky/flighty at times. It is not that I made a big decision and then regretted it and changed my mind (usually), it is that my mind sees 18 options where someone else might see just 2. I see the options, every reiteration of an option, the hidden options, the parallel options. It can be exhausting both to be me and- I am certain, to love me. 

Some choices become milestones that we might miss if we are not lucky. Take notice. The first time I make a choice and let my driving teenager drive to a big city an hour away. This is setting a precedent for more independence for him.  The first time my younger teenager calls the Apple store himself to make an appointment to get a device fixed, he is now one step closer to becoming and behaving like an adult. The choice to let my children stay at private school is a choice I make yearly and it directly impacts how many hours I need to work, where we might travel to, what other funds are available.  The choice  to let a child start dating? That can be full of ups and downs and opens up many, many conversations.   Sometimes we make bad choices and then have to revise. I’ve learned that a lot of parenting is trial and error. When I was a child I thought my parents knew everything. Now as a parent, I realize that every parent is just sort of winging it and reevaluating with every choice they make. 

The biggest choice I have had to make recently and am in the process of fine-tuning is my choice to get my post-graduate certification in psychiatry. I love mental health. This is a long time goal of mime, but it was still a hard choice that I circled back to multiple time. I am tired of school. My career in primary care is exhausting. Key theme? TIRED. 😝There are things I want in a job that I could perhaps attain right now if I just took a closer to full-time position as an FNP and said forget psych. I would me more financially set and better equipped to make some of the choices that affect the budget mentioned earlier. I would be more just "set" instead of trying to find the ever imperfect coupling of the job+student+clinical+mom+wife=somewhat balanced life equation. In order to do school some happiness, balance, income, energy has to be sacrificed. It was/is a difficult sell. I started back at the beginning and even took some medical specialty inventory exams. Psych was of course in my top 10. Though so were other options such as oncology, occupational medicine, hematology, pediatrics...I looked around. I thought and am thinking still, about the best place to work while I am adding school back into my life and whether or not that is my never off the clock even though I am part-time role in primary care/family medicine. 

Every time we say YES to one thing we are saying NO to something else, whether it is tangible or possible. I guess all my ramblings today are to remind myself and others to choose our YES carefully. 

What have you said YES to lately that meant saying NO to something else, or conversely, what have you said NO to in order to make more time for your YES?

Thanks for reading!