Monday, September 06, 2010

Bad-breathed pit-bulls

Even though I love change, I hate making decisions.

I don't mind the little ones, like which chocolate to choose from the box. Even the medium sized ones aren't bad, like where to go for a holiday. But at the moment I have a number of really BIG decisions to make and I am starting to feel paralysed. Well, maybe not quite paralysed, but certainly stuck. I (we) have some decisions to make about our future which are what I would call proactive decisions.

I’ve had to make many reactive decisions in my life, but not many proactive ones. When I was 17 I had to decide if I was going to move away from my country town to go to Melbourne for uni. That was a huge one. But even that had a level of reactivity; I was finishing high school. I had to decide to do something. All of my career changes have also been fairly reactive. I hated my first job. I wasn’t very good at my second job. It was easy each time to look ahead to something brighter. Moving from a sensational location in inner city Melbourne to the suburbs was an easy, reactive decision, because people we loved wanted us to start an exciting new home-based neighborhood church with them – something my husband and I had always dreamed of doing.

At the moment there is not a great deal of impetus for change. Things are going well, and while our little community is evolving into something else, and maybe even finishing, we don’t have to leave our current home. My job is stable and I enjoy it. Travel to work is easy and family and friends are close enough. But I’ve made the proactive decision to have a more challenging career at some stage in the future. So I have applied to do a Masters course next year. Which means I have to choose between cutting down on days at work or increasing the number of days my 2.5 year old will have in care next year.

I also feel an incredibly strong need to decide where our future lives will be centered for the next 10-20+ years. Where will we call home? Where will our kids go to school? As I’ve mentioned before, it’s much harder than I thought it would/should be to cut the ties from the Aussie social/emotional dream of house ownership. It seems to be hard-wired into me. So do we stay where we are and rent, with our sense of security laying vulnerable in the landlords' hands? Or do we buy somewhere else and, like the settlers of old’n days in search of the Promised Land, forge new ground and call it Home?

I really feel like it is important to face these decisions head on, but they have shape-shifted into drooling, growling, bad-breathed pit-bulls. I reckon if I can take them on and win, I will have passed some kind of initiation test into true adulthood. True personhood even. Made in the image of God or some such thing. Decision making is a greatly creative endeavor when you think about it - it shows the world that we exist and it shows the world who we really are.

Even though I love change, I hate making decisions. And I’m still stuck.

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