Curiosity

You make a thousand decisions everyday. A small number of important ones, and a large number of not-so important ones.

Some of these turn out for the better. Good choices.

However, some don’t.

How many times have you lied awake at night, wondering, what if?
What if retrospectively you had chosen something else, one of thehe other options you had?

You’d pick the cheesecake over the tart.

You’d rather have not gone for the lunch with the boring colleague, hoping for a favour.

You’d ask out the girl, before someone else did.

You’d not have jumped the red light, when there was a car already approaching out of your sight.

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You can also trace these events back based on a single decision you made earlier. A single bite of logic, a strand of thought, pulsing through your nerves, realised by your actions.

At times, the smallest of these can effect a change in the most dramatic of ways.

This is called the butterfly effect.

When the smallest of your decisions, often taken arbitrarily, ends up winding into something much bigger than expected.

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The final word is, the decisions we take shape our lives. It’s not fate, nor karma that does so.

Sometimes, it’s others who take decisions for us.

Maybe the bakery didn’t stock cheesecake that day.

Maybe someone else jumped the red light, while it was you who was crossing the street.

And the funny thing is, there isn’t anything you can change about it. It’s not in your hands. Nor is it a given that you will take better decisions in the future. You can think you’ll learn from your mistakes, but that’s a placebo. The world is too dynamic, too volatile for you to draw upon your past actions as an experience to learn from.

Every choice is new, with a fresh set of variables, risks and rewards. And really, it’s your choosing, your weighing the impact of your choices, that makes these long days worth living.