Welcome.
In today's practice,
We will delve into the dilemma of decisions.
When we are in a dilemma about a decision we have to make,
What is it that drives us towards the choice we make?
If we sit with this question,
We may have to dive deep to understand the process of our decision making.
The pain of choosing is not alien to any of us.
In fact,
When we have lived our life long enough,
We are familiar with the visceral feeling of the decision fatigue we face.
Like James Hollis says,
We are all recovering children.
And I agree,
Because my ultimate fantasy is someone deciding for me and it magically being what I wished for.
What a perfect fairytale life that would be.
Like being a child forever and not having to bear the burden of choosing ever.
But in real life,
We grow up,
And as adults,
We have to make choices.
And in the current times,
Where there are a billion choices,
Choosing,
Deciding,
Is a Herculean task.
In Aristophanes' play,
The Frogs,
When Hercules is sent to Underworld to bargain with the gods of the lower worlds for the return of their greatest playwrights,
He is in a dilemma about how to choose the best playwright.
After multiple tasks and negotiations with the gods.
When this issue remains unsolved,
Hercules calls upon Athena for her wisdom and help in this matter.
She surprisingly simply says,
Choose the one in whom your heart delights,
Meaning pick the one you love even though you respect them all.
Now that sounds very simple but how does one arrive at the answer for what we truly love?
You may think that is easy.
But when our lives are curated by the validation of the external world,
How do we know our choice is truly ours?
Can we say with conviction it is not the one we think the world will love?
I think this is the root of the problem.
Cause of exhaustion that accompanies our decision making in current times.
The need to please the world and people around us is intrinsic and imbued and we may miss it completely.
It is deeply ingrained because to belong is a primary need.
So it's possible that we may end up choosing from a place to belong and please and not from a place of what we truly want and need.
Thus creating a chasm between being ourselves and being what the world expects us to be.
So,
In the words of C.
J.
Young,
What supports us when nothing supports us during this dilemma?
This is the question we have to sit with when faced with the dilemma of decision making.
Choosing between what we love and what we think we must love is a difficult one.
The instinct is to move quickly towards a choice,
To escape the agony of it.
But Jung says,
The real growth happens when we sit in the tension of the opposites.
When we endure the tormenting pull of two opposites,
A third thing emerges.
It arises from the ego,
Which seeks to satiate its selfishness,
Or from the codependency that chooses the easy way out to please the world.
But it comes from the other,
Our soul,
That knows what is right for us.
And this is The Walk.
Building the resilience,
Patience and the endurance to sit in this cooking pot.
This is how we grow into our potential and eventually into our greatness.
This is the life's work because this process costs us something valuable.
Sometimes it's our innocence,
Sometimes it's our beliefs and sometimes it's our own life.
But like a young tree must weather the winter to survive and grow,
We must undergo this process to become bigger than our problems.
Again,
Like Jung says,
Our problems never go away.
We can only be bigger than them to solve them.
And thus the cycle goes on.
We grow and so do our problems and thus we come into our soul's purpose and our life's potential.
And the dilemma of decisions is the milieu that shapes us,
Chisel by chisel.
Hence,
It's important to choose from the place of the other.
Which knows what are hard.
Truly,
Delight Sent.
Thank you for sharing this space with me today.
And as you move through the day,
May you find deep within you the courage to choose that which delights your heart.
Lots of love.
