I’ve become somewhat of a crazy cat person and instead of fashioning them into my schedule, I have fully morphed into theirs.
No surprise then, that yesterday morning, I fall out of bed again at four in order to get the upstairs ones their breakfast, Tetsuo who is the outside night-watchman, his, and then feed and release all the overnighters in the office below.
It is a routine that I have established that takes the first 45 minutes of my day … every day. And though it may sound like I begrudge it, I genuinely don’t.
In many ways I have found purpose in helping these little guys and giving them a safe harbor from an otherwise unknown world.
Once done, I have my own breakfast and then look at myself to see what I want to do before I start the rest of my day. Yesterday (as often before), the decision was to grab a coffee and the camera and head for Lake Parker to enjoy the twilight and herald the day in that way.
It was a gorgeous clear-sky twilight where the horizon gets infused with the most beautiful warm orange and peach colors and I found such peace in the quiet and natural heaven that I found myself standing in.
It isn’t possible to have a more peaceful entrance into a day and I breathed in the moment that mother nature was kind enough to share with me.
I only had the 11 mm lens with me, so I hope you like the collection of images it took, which are at the end of the blog.
I’ve made that same decision in favor of a morning start at Lake Parker, many times before and I asked myself if it was the right decision to make once again.
But they say you can never have enough of a good thing and in this instance, I think that saying is correct. Though the venue has been the same for many of my shoots, there always seems to be at least a very slight difference from one twilight to another.
It might be the condition of the sky, the morning temperature, or even just the state of mind that I am in. But there always seems to be enough difference that stops me from feeling a deja vu moment.
After I paused and said hi to my mom and dad ( a tiny piece of them was poured into the lake after their deaths), I said hi to a couple of fishermen that were heading out in their boat, climbed into the car, and drove home.
As is often the case, I mused over what the morning had brought and my role in making it happen. There was no longer a question in my mind of whether I should or shouldn’t have gone there. But that’s when the thought for today’s blog began to run around inside my head.
You see, we make many decisions for ourselves each day and each one takes us on a different journey than if we had decided differently. In the “many world’s theory” there is an infinite number of versions of us that follow each decision path simultaneously and while I think that is an interesting thought, I balk at the reality of such a theory.
Rather, I choose to believe that there is only one version of us traveling on a single journey through life and in many ways this one journey is shaped by the decisions we make along the way.
In the many world’s theory, our decisions wouldn’t matter and it would absolve us of consequence of good or bad decisions. But in my reality our decisions do matter and as such, we are bound to make as many good decisions as we can.
It is difficult to confidently make a good decision. We can give it our best shot based on our knowledge, past experience, and whatever factors might affect its outcome. But there is no guarantee that any decision we make is a good one.
Life brings very few guarantees along the way and other than eventual death, I can’t think of a single one. Can you?
So what that means is that with no guarantees of success, it is important to understand our decision making process and try to reduce the risk that whatever decision we make might result in a fail.
Most people make decisions glibly without aforethought. They reserve aforethought for what they consider to be serious decisions (financial, career, future plans, etc.)
We can’t grind ourselves to a stop at each decision point in our lives, taking time to overthink what we should do. We would end up never taking a step forward and life would be arduous and slow.
But, like most things in life, there is a balance that we should seek between both extremes and make sure that each decision along our journey is given a reasonable amount of thought consistent with its importance.
“What shirt will I wear today?” is less life-affecting than “do I take up smoking?” which is less life affecting that “let’s play Russian roulette. I am bored.”
And even if analyzing our decisions before they are made isn’t possible due to the circumstances we make them in, then we should at least ask ourselves how we made that decision later when we have a quieter moment.
The value in doing that is that the importance of each decision is not always obvious and sometimes we make what we consider to be a small decision that turns out to be life affecting. “How about one more drink for the road?”
I am not going to labor the point but I have often found myself at night in bed reviewing decisions made during the day. It has turned out to be a very effective way to understand how it is that I make decisions and whether I have missed something or not that would improve the likelihood of a better decision.
Knowing ourselves and understanding what makes us tick is a very important part of our life experience. Analyzing how and why we make decisions is one part of that and well worth the few minutes that it takes.
… just a thought.
