Yes Or No

When you are faced with a decision about something important, do you have a tough time deciding whether to say yes or no?

Lots of people do, and it’s kind of strange because it really is such a simple thing. There are only two choices and you would think that would be a simple thing to do to pick one of them.

But sometimes what seems simple on the surface turns out to be not quite so simple after all.

With deciding things we often don’t put all our attention on the thing to be decided. Instead, what we do is try to live in our imagination and make up all kinds of circumstances around the decision that we think are going to be affected by our action.

Sometimes the things we think about are in the past. We conjure up the memories of times when we have experienced similar situations and try to make ourselves believe that whatever is happening right now is really the same thing as what happened before.

But that is not how the Universe works. There are no do-overs, there aren’t any situations coming up that we have gone through before, there is only now.

It doesn’t matter, for instance, how many times in our past we decided not to put on a bathing suit and jump into the pool to go swimming. It doesn’t matter that before we felt embarrassed by our physical condition and made up that everybody was watching us while we were splashing around in the pool.

Even if in those pool-jumping in times in the past, we heard a comment aimed in our direction about how we looked in our suit, the only person who is hearing that comment again in the present moment is you.

Nobody else can hear that voice in your head that is trying to convince you that everyone is going to laugh at you when you dive into the pool. Truthfully, they are all listening to their own voices and don’t have time for yours. But because your experience in the past has taught you that when you jump into the pool, people will single you out for derision, you bring that long ago event into your present.

 

And that makes your decision to jump into the pool or not a very difficult one. Even when its 115 degrees in the shade and anyone with an ounce of common sense would be in the pool with a cool drink in their hand, you are still on the side listening to the voices in your mind telling you to stay out of the water.

That is one of those times when such a simple choice looms up in an overly large manner. Buoyed up by the shadow of your past, a yes or no situation becomes a no win at all for you predicament.

And sometimes, we have choices to make but we try to peer into the future to see what the outcome will be and then try to make our decision based on our ability to see into the future. Now some folks probably have that ability, but actually not all that many. Most of us just kind of pretend that we know exactly what is going to happen as a result of some choice we make.

Now there are

DECISIONS !!!!!

 

and there are

decisions

If you are standing at the corner of a busy intersection and decide to walk across the street in the middle of the traffic, it is pretty likely that you are going to get hit by a car. You don’t need to be a fortune teller to see that one coming. But trying to decide if you are going to have a lasting relationship and using that intuitive idea to decide if you are going to go out on a date or not, is not going to be all that successful.

For most things, you just don’t really know everything that is going to happen as a result of your decision. Ever. So using that thought, to keep you from making a yes choice or no choice doesn’t help much because you aren’t ever really going to know until you decide something. Sure there are some situations where your intuition is going to tell you to pick one thing or another, and then you should listen.

But trying to make yourself believe that your intuition is telling you whether to go to the mall to see one particular movie over another, you might be waiting a long time for that answer. And truth is, it is ever so much easier to just pick a movie and see what happens.

Well, that kind of takes care of trying to use the past to make decisions in the present and trying to use the future to make decisions in the present, I wonder if there is any other time left which we can use to decide in.

Why, yes, there is.

The present. What a handy idea, its right here waiting for us to use. Right here, right now, like they are always saying on the news channels. The present is the perfect time for making decisions.  And handily enough, it is the only time for doing so.

When its time to pick, when there is a decision that is as simple as yes or no. You can take advice from the past if you want to, or try to project the consequences into the future if you want to do that too. But if you just take a minute, and take a breath, and let your mind be free of anything except the present moment, you will find that all your decisions are easy ones.

Like this:

 

 

 

Once you start living your life that way, it will become the way you do everything and you life will be even bigger and even better than it is right now.

Excellent.