LOVE, Kloudiia

Is having options good?

I believe everyone will say yes. Indeed, having options is a luxury. However, if we keep our options open for too long while at the same time opening more, then it can potentially cost us more than we would imagine.

Recently my girl friend had been struggling with making a decision. While it looked good that she had a number of alternatives she could consider, yet, these options that she had kept open for herself took a toll on her.

The number of sleepless nights and the endless worries (old plus new) made her lose her appetite and gave her some gastric problems. The lost of focus caused her to be mired in the web of confusion for as long as she took to arrive at a decision. That means, she has to close the doors to the options that she had kept open and just focus on looking at one of them. 

That, as I found out, takes hard work. Not just for her, but for anyone to do so. 

Why do we take so long to decide on one thing? Because I realized we’re afraid we might make the wrong choice and regret later. Do we always know what is the best thing to do at anytime in our life? No, we don’t. Therefore we can only rely on as much information as we manage to get at that time and at times, based on our gut feel. 

I know how hard it can be for some people to make decisions. It’s as if when they decide to take Route A, they would miss out on the events that could happen along Route B. Never mind that Route B is actually not as exciting as Route A, but so long as they would miss something by choosing another, it makes them freak out. This fear holds them back from committing, and hence, impedes their decision making process and speed.

The fear of closing the doors that might lead them to something unconsciously weighs down on us and to avoid that, we naturally prolong the process. Time, then, is the crux of the issue here. The longer time we have, the longer we tend to deliberate. Good or bad, it depends.

The time lost in swinging to and fro in the decision making process can be costly, if the time taken is too long. Not only opportunities could be passed, the amount of realization one gets is sharply reduced too. Because the truth is we really don’t and won’t know if we’ve made the right choice until we made it and carried it out to see if we had made the right move, isn’t it? This, is the realisaiton I’m talking about, and any delay in moving forward with the choice you’ve made will cost you this.

That’s why I say, at times, having too many options may have more evil than good in itself, especially for those who are afraid of letting go. 

What happens when you have too many options to go through? I say, like what Nike always preaches: Just Do It!

We won’t know if the decision we make today will be the exact reason we celebrate maybe 10 years later. But what I know for sure is if we fail to make the decision today, it will be the reason for regret 1 year later. 

So, just choose one door and walk through it. There will be surprises, nice and nasty ones, waiting. But that’s life, isn’t it?