The last week has seen some fairly shameless fence straddling, as the reality of needing to make decisions returns to challenge our now-rusty powers of decisiveness!
You could say it’s a symptom of today’s indefinite environment, that we struggle to make any definite decisions... or at least not without a considerable amount of umming and ahing beforehand!
To go to the gym, or not?
To put the kettle on, or not?
To change career paths or not?
Choosing between ideas is taxing business, and this applies as much to small decisions as it does the big, life-altering ones.
On the plus side though, all this indecision CAN have it’s perks.
For starters, all that contemplating, researching and analysing certainly brings down the stakes on any resultant decisions!
Not only this, ambivalence encourages a kind of cognitive flexibility that is widely under-appreciated in this age that has glorified spontaneity and 'just do it!'
Given the opportunity to to and fro between ideas, our minds are able to make much broader connections, which then, in turn, better prepares us for many more eventualities than we might have been ready for otherwise.
From this angle, the fence might not be such a bad squat to cop after all! Yes, it might be a bit uncomfortable at times, but if it affords us greater ownership over those all-important life-improving boundaries...then it's a small price to pay!