Impossible Choices

When Life Brings You to a Cliff Edge

Photo by Robin Schreiner on Unsplash

I have a morbid fascination with high places. I scare myself by realizing how easily I could suspend reason and just jump.  Just one second – just one micro decision and my life will never be the same again.

Maybe I shouldn’t have shared that with you.  Maybe you’ll begin to wonder about me.  Or maybe, just maybe you do that too: Have those crazy thoughts that then scare the bejezus out of you.   It’s ok I won’t tell.  It can be our secret.

I don’t actually like high places.  What I do like is to climb.  I guess I’m a bit of a cat.  Climbing makes me happy.  It’s just that once I get up, I need to get down. 

A snippet of a song by Andy Stewart runs through my head.  “It’s not the fall but landing that will alter social standing.”

Every morning, I walk on the cliffs by my house testing my free will to not irrevocably change my life.

It’s scary to think we have that much freedom.  Perhaps that’s why we seek parental figures in religion and government – hoping that it isn’t really true that we have that much responsibility for our lives.  

There mustn’t be many lawyers in Portugal…or perhaps they aren’t particularly ambitious.  If this was America there would be guardrails everywhere. I have walked on so many castles and ruins and cliff edges here always knowing that it is my decision to walk these intrepid spaces, and no one will be available to sue the authorities if I lose my footing and fall to my demise.  Thank god. 

It is a bit ridiculous if you think about it.  Americans despite trying to impose our will on the rest of the world are like children that if we get hurt immediately want to blame someone else.  We want government to be our parents to tell us that coffee is hot and might burn you and that if you walk on a century’s old turret with no guardrails that you might slip and fall.

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The maturity of midlife can sometimes feel like a boobie prize.  We’re too old to feign youthful naivete.  “Really coffee is hot and will burn you if it spills?”  And yet while we know that our choices have consequences, we are not omniscient beings.  We can’t always know what the outcomes will be.

Unexpectedly, I am facing another major life choice - a fork in the road - two paths diverging. Reductionist self-help suggests I need to lean into my values to help me make a choice I won’t regret. That’s all well and good until you realize you can have a values conflict.

I was recently invited to comment at a forum on being an entrepreneur and having a family and how to balance the two.  I was asked to discuss how to set priorities.  The question was a trap I believe.  Life isn’t that simple.  I’ve grown to detest reductionist self-help.  “Learn to prioritize” (please read this in a “condescending as if you hadn’t thought of something so obvious tone”). 

“Really, gee, thanks.” Now tell me what to do when you have two things (or more than two things) that are equally and incredibly important to you and you have to pick.  Presentation to the Board that only you can do vs kids championship game?  “Learn to prioritize” – “F you.”

My kids like to play the game “would you rather” with me.  They always give me the most impossible choices.  “Would you rather be buried alive or slowly tortured to death?”  Apparently, the game doesn’t allow a choice of neither.  God, I hope I’m not raising psychopaths.  They love to see me squirm.

What do you do when your heart wants two things?  When you need and want to be in two places at the same time?  If you have two kids struggling and needing different things in different places. Is there ever an easy way to make Sophie’s choice?

What do you do when your heart wants two things?  When you need and want to be in two places at the same time?  Is there ever an easy way to make Sophie’s choice?

Yet not choosing is also a choice and often when we resist life has a funny way of forcing your hand. John O’Donohue an Irish poet, priest and philosopher writes, “We are often surprised by change that seems to arrive out of nowhere. We find ourselves crossing some new threshold we had never anticipated.¹”

How often does life happen to us?  The divorce, the diagnosis, the business failure that we didn’t foresee.  We’re brought to a cliff edge we didn’t anticipate and didn’t choose.  How did we not see it coming? Should we have known that the coffee was hot?

Nature is often my solace and source of wisdom.  We trust that the new shoots of spring are developing under the cold winter ground.  We don’t force an apple to fall from the tree before it is ripe.  Yet, I am not as wise as nature. 

Trust.  Allow. Wait. Surrender.  These words don’t come easily to me.

A friend sent me an invitation to allow easy.

Chuang Tzu you’re a trickster.  Begin right and you are easy.  Continue easy and you are right.  How do we know what right is?  How do we make choices when two things feel right? I’d like to think that this worn and tattered clipping means that my friend struggles with living this wisdom too.

Life is like walking in the fog at times.  Sometimes we need to grab the next rung of the ladder even if we can’t see where the top of the ladder leads. 

If you too have arrived at a threshold whether one you initiated or one that life forced upon you perhaps John O’Donoghue’s questions will offer you a thread of guidance:

At which threshold am I now standing?
At this time in my life, what am I leaving?
Where am I about to enter?
What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold?
What gift would enable me to do it?

Today, I didn’t jump.

1. John O’Donahue To Bless the Space Between Us