Why is making a decision so hard at times?

Towards the end of last year, my brother was in the city for work and staying with us. My mother came over too, to make the most of the precious few days we all get to be together now. She lives in the same city as me but an hour away and my bother, needless to say lives abroad with his family. One evening my 5 year old wanted to go to the park to play, and we all decided to step out and head to a new park with him. So there we were me, my husband, my son, mother and brother.

As we walked on the promenade a structure caught my son’s attention, he ran to climb and investigate it, my husband followed him. My mother and brother waited for a bit and then continued walking ahead. At this point I stopped, unsure. I looked ahead and there were my mum and brother walking along and I looked to the right and there were my husband and son playing. This was not a big life decision, I just had to decide which way I wanted to go. But neither was it a simple decision, in that moment I felt completely torn, I looked one way and there was my family walking away and I looked another and there was my family waiting for me. I had to choose between the past I knew and was increasingly nostalgic about with age, and the present and future I had consciously chosen and was sometimes tired yet mostly happy with. I had to choose again. I had to choose between two equally valid and equally viable options.

I felt momentarily paralysed seeing no clear and easy answer. I had to let go of one to move towards the other. Whichever one I chose, I had to bear the sadness of letting go of the other. This might seem trivial as I wasn’t really losing anyone, yet it was such a powerful metaphor for what keeps us stuck in life. Perhaps that is why making a choice is so hard. We don’t want to be sad, we don’t want to face the loss of a possibility or of a bond. Yet there is no other way to move forward. Choosing the future means having to let go of the past. Choosing one version of ourselves, implies having to leave another. Choosing one path means having to miss other adventures you might have had on the other path. And sometimes we have to make that choice again and again. Choose what we opted for especially when it gets hard and the other beckons again, as if to tease and test us. We need to affirm our choices.

As I walked towards my husband and child I looked wistfully at the receding figures of my brother and mother and felt a pang, a sadness for a time that is gone and will never return. Over the years I have understood that nostalgia is a feeling that comes from a need to freeze time, to keep things intact as they were when we experienced them. It is not real and it is a device we have perfected to try to keep change away from the things that we once loved. From parts of us that are gone and did not make it here with us. But what we are truly nostalgic for is the feeling and try as we might those are ephemeral and not something that can be recaptured no matter how hard we try – the feeling of being safe in your father’s arms, of sharing a home with a sibling or belonging to a group in school. Why do most school reunions feel disappointing? Because that feeling will not, cannot be resurrected, it belonged to a moment in time that is finished and cannot be conjured up again, because even if we tried not to, we did change and grow. Most of us, most of the time.

We can resist change but we cannot deny it, and you can choose to go with it with a nod to the past or pretending it doesn’t affect you or kicking, screaming and complaining. Times of transition are hard, but when we can go through it by making space for the parts of us that are sad, wistful and even fearful perhaps then we can carry those parts gently with us into the future. Acknowledging and accepting the sense of loss that inevitably accompanies choosing can actually help us move forward, as it enables us to release what no longer belongs here or what can no longer accompany us if we are to go in a certain direction.

So the next time you have a choice between a known past and a future that is coming into being, take the time to feel the loss and then move to one that will take you closer to the future you are choosing to create. Accept sadness and fear as part of stepping into the unknown and know that growth is about venturing beyond comfort, beyond nostalgia and into a space of not having all the answers, but enjoying the process of discovering and finding new parts of ourselves waiting to bloom.