Pay Your Dollar And Place Your Bet

Hate To Break It To You is a recurring feature wherein we dispense succinct home truths that everyone could benefit from facing up to, unpleasant as they may be.

Photo by John Wardell

Every big life decision comes with risk and there’s no way to know if the decision is the right one before you make it and proceed to live the results. You can do your homework, research the hell out of your options, consult experts, pray for divine intervention and/or consult Madame Cleo, but there are still no guarantees. Perfect information is a lie.  Eventually, it comes down to your gut, your intuition and your willingness to sack up and accept that this might not play out as you expected/hoped. Don’t let the ambiguity paralyze you and don’t fall victim to believing that if this truly was the right course of action that you’d already know that 100%. There’d a sign from the heavens, a sense of inner peace. I knew as soon as we locked eyes, as soon as I saw the job ad, as soon as I stepped off the plane at JFK. That’s simply hindsight romanticizing. Those decisions may have panned out, but don’t let anyone convince you that their heart wasn’t in their throat as they touched down on the runway and that they weren’t already thinking about when the next flight back to Des Moines was (you know, just in case).

You take all of the input you have, you take the feeling in the pit of your stomach and in your chest, you take your laudable logic and the crazy beating of your heart and you do whatever it is you think will make you happy/happier and improve your life. And you accept that you, just like any of the rest of us on any given day, might be utterly wrong. You accept it because that’s the way it is and always will be and because the possible pay-off of having chosen rightly trumps your risk aversion. It simply has to.