"There's no point in spending your life in the pursuit of something that's easy." - Alice Kuipers

Thursday, June 17, 2010

A Meditation on Passion and Decision Making

Why is it that we always second guess ourselves? It seems as though every time I make a decision I immediately feel it was the wrong one. It's only when I look back on it, after all is said and done that I'm truly able to say, "yep that was the right decision" or, "that was incredibly stupid".
I wish I had better reasoning skills. I'm not a logical person. I seem to operate solely on my emotions and gut reflexes. I'm not able to detach myself and simply look at the facts. Instead, I look at how I feel about the facts. I look at how the outcome of my decision will make me feel. Now, that wouldn't be so bad if I also took into consideration how my decisions would make me feel in the more distant future, but I'm almost entirely a 'now' person. For example, I'm only able to focus on goals if they're attainable in the near future. That's why even with my long term goals, I have to break them down into a series of easily attainable steps. If I don't accomplish my goals quickly enough then my attention will wander to a new idea and I'll start all over again, never really accomplishing anything.
It's the same with my enthusiasm. It's short lived.
In fact, I was telling my husband just the other day,
"I'm not someone who can stay passionate about any one thing for a long time. My passion flares up and burns brightly for a moment and then peters out almost immediately. Aside from you, my passion for anything rarely lasts longer than a month. My passion is like a series of small explosions. BOOM! It's there and then it's gone. Something new enters my head and BOOM! A flare of passion for this new idea before it burns out and it's gone."
He looked at me with a devilish look in his eye and said,
"So you experience small passion explosions?"
I laughed, told him he was gross and we moved on. Thank God I have such wise council.

2 comments:

  1. One thing I love about Matt is his ability to play devil's advocate. No matter what the subject, and no matter what his own personal opinion on it, he can ask all the right questions to challenge my views and my opinion, making me look a multiple sides of a situation. It's something that I wasn't very good at on my own, and basically having a Philosophy prof at my disposal is very useful.

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  2. Well I'm glad you can look at it that way, I've always found arguing for the sake of arguing irritating. My poor hubbie has never been able to enlighten me. All he gets for his trouble is a very irritated and snarky wife

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