DECISIONS
Why are decisions difficult? In John Garner's novel, Grendl, the protagonist, confounded by life's mysteries, consults a wise priest who utters two simple phrases, four terrifying words: Everything fades and alternatives exclude.
"Alternatives exclude" - that concept lies at the heart of so many decisional difficulties. For every "yes" there must be a "no". Decisions are expensive because they demand renunciation. This phenomenon has attracted great minds throughout the ages. Aristotle imagined a hungry dog unable to choose between two equally attractive portions of food, and the medieval scholastics wrote of Burridan's ass, which starved to death between two equally sweet-smelling bales of hay.
Death is a boundary experience capable of moving an individual from an everyday state of mind to an ontological state (a state of being in which we are aware of being) in which change is more possible. Decision is another boundary experience. It not only confronts us with the degree to which we create ourselves but also to the limits of possibilities. Making a decision cuts us off from other possibilities. Choosing one woman, or one career, or one school, means relinquishing the possibility of others. The more we face our limits, the more we have to relinquish our myth of personal specialness, unlimited potential, imperishability, and immunity to the laws of biological destiny. It is for these reasons that Heidegger referred to death as the impossibility of further possibility. The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness - domains soaked in anxiety. Everything fades and alternatives exclude.
Irvin Yalom
Why are decisions difficult? In John Garner's novel, Grendl, the protagonist, confounded by life's mysteries, consults a wise priest who utters two simple phrases, four terrifying words: Everything fades and alternatives exclude.
"Alternatives exclude" - that concept lies at the heart of so many decisional difficulties. For every "yes" there must be a "no". Decisions are expensive because they demand renunciation. This phenomenon has attracted great minds throughout the ages. Aristotle imagined a hungry dog unable to choose between two equally attractive portions of food, and the medieval scholastics wrote of Burridan's ass, which starved to death between two equally sweet-smelling bales of hay.
Death is a boundary experience capable of moving an individual from an everyday state of mind to an ontological state (a state of being in which we are aware of being) in which change is more possible. Decision is another boundary experience. It not only confronts us with the degree to which we create ourselves but also to the limits of possibilities. Making a decision cuts us off from other possibilities. Choosing one woman, or one career, or one school, means relinquishing the possibility of others. The more we face our limits, the more we have to relinquish our myth of personal specialness, unlimited potential, imperishability, and immunity to the laws of biological destiny. It is for these reasons that Heidegger referred to death as the impossibility of further possibility. The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness - domains soaked in anxiety. Everything fades and alternatives exclude.
Irvin Yalom
