It’s hard to really be sure of any decision in life. Whether you want to look at the world in a highly logical way, or you want your gut to lead you through decision making, there will come times where you can’t know what the right path forward is.
Big decisions will often have a lot of noise around them, and it makes it even harder to come to any conclusion.
This noise comes in a lot of forms.
“You see, I wanted to move to the city, but I’d have sell my car, I’d need to figure out how to break lease…”
“I do love you, but I just got out of a relationship, I’m busy with a new job…”
“I want to take on this project, but I’m just so busy — I’m also trying to buy a house, I’m trying to get approved for a loan…”
While I’m generally a proponent of being a detail oriented person, with some life goals I need to remind myself the only question that matters is whether I want to give it a try or not.
There’s always going to be nuance, and there’s plenty of situational reasons why something might not be work. But ultimately, when I think about the story of my life, I want to know that I gave it everything I could. I don’t want to look back and know I could’ve lived where I wanted, loved who I wanted, and done what I wanted, only to not truly try to live the life I wanted to live.
The details distract from that though. Sometimes the question of what you want to spend your life doing is spent on silly noise. I don’t want to be too busy or distracted by things that wouldn’t make it onto my bucket list such that I’m unable to accomplish my real priorities.
Sometimes I ask myself — if I put my time into working through the details, do I want to be all in? Do I want to overcome these problems that I am facing so that I can be in the position to take this chance? Sure, maybe my goal might be difficult or unlikely or time intensive. But those are just details. Assuming I can figure out the details, what’s the upside here? Is this a chance at something I’ve always wanted? Do I really want to try?
And when I frame my life and my decisions in that way, it gets easier. Because even when I don’t know how I am going to get there, I can focus on the life I want to live.
Everything else is just a detail.
