After Choosing, the Sadness 😔😔
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Hello friends,
I've been reflecting on choices and decision at a personal angle (not just objective pros vs cons) and wrote about it 2 weeks ago in this post, The Pain of Choosing. It has resonated with quite a few of you, which prompted me to write this post. Now that I've made certain choices, how do I live with them?
Here's the scenario.
Suppose that you've been wrestling with a difficult decision that will have a long term impact in your life.
Perhaps it is settling in or moving away from a place, committing or leaving a relationship or accepting or quitting a job. If you are a leader, maybe it is making a big strategic move in the big unknownfor your team and company. Provided that you have done the hard work of deliberation and are now finally clear, how do you make sense of the enormity of the letdown feeling of "THIS IS IT", or the sadness of closing other doors?
This question has been on my mind, and it is relevant for many people who will soon make a big decision of the leave or stay type.
I write this post to reflect on that experience, and I hope that you might find it helpful too. I'd love to hear your thoughts, so do write back to me.
With joy and gratitude,
Khuyen
After Choosing, the Sadness
Professor Farnsworth knows this tricky journey of making hard, good choice PC
There are at least two kinds of people: those who panic before a hard decision, and those who struggle after.
Some like me tend to get into paralysis analysis trying to make the optimal choice. This is where the deliberation of “Who do I choose to become” can be helpful.
Others panic after the decision, second-guessing if they have made the right choice. This is about learning to live with not knowing. Psychologically, once you truly cross the threshold this way, a shift happens. From worrying about making the right choice, we choose to make the choice right.
However, if you have stayed true to the process and made the choice, chances are you won’t have as much panic before or second-guess after. This post is about something different: the little hiccups after a good decision.
I remember a moment earlier this year when I decided to work with MindKind Institute.
After plenty of careful deliberation, I made a wholehearted choice of Yes.
While I was excited (“finally, no longer just loitering around!”), there was also a slight tinge of sadness.
To make matters more strange, I got to work with wonderful people doing meaningful work. I have flexible workload, learn a lot and even get decent compensation, which is the best anyone can ask for.
Yet there was still some sadness. How crazy is that? Am I an ungrateful bastard to even feel so?
One simple explanation is our “grass is always greener on the other side” human desire. The Buddhist calls this fundamental unsatisfactoriness of life dukkha. The Buddhist solution is to just see this dissatisfaction for what it is: just another impermanence that arises and passes away.
Another solution to dukkha is gratitude, or “count your blessing”. When we are grateful, especially at a fundamental “I’m so glad to still be alive” level, dukkha will no longer hold us in its grip. In Christian terms, we’ve got to remember the unconditional love of God through the sacrifice of Jesus.
While both approaches do work wonder, I sometimes find it too harsh to say “just be thankful” or “just observe”, which in a strange way means “just suck it up”. Plus that explanation doesn’t honor the immediate experience the sadness, which I know must somehow serve a purpose.
The Sadness of Letting Go
As I sat with myself, I realized that albeit this was clearly a good decision, my life wouldn’t exactly be the same, with more freedom to write & read, meeting new people and just spending time however I wanted.
That sadness indeed had a gem of wisdom. Life, albeit good, will never be the same again.
Oftentimes, we are so exhausted from the long deliberation that by the time we move forwards with an important personal decision, we mostly are just relieved. What we likely miss out then is a chance to appreciate such finer beauty of the inner life, like this paradoxical sadness after making a difficult choice.
The sadness is actually a sign of letting go, a natural process of maturity like a butterfly leaving its psychological cocoon. What was once comforting is now confining. It no longer serves the nurturing purpose and has to be let go of, as painful as it might be.
On a similar vein, you might have heard of the cliche feeling of letdown or the confusing emptiness after you have achieved your grand ambition and realized that it is not exactly what you’ve been after. In a strange way, this sadness is actually a close cousin of those. They all are signs of letting go, in this case of certain ideal or expectation.
For example, in a relationship breakup it’s the letting go of the romantic ideal of Finding The One, or in my personal case the need to prove myself “I’m strong enough to persevere a relationship”. Another example in the domain of career, even if the ambition is as wonderful as “to make a positive difference in lives of a billion people”, it sometimes has to be let go of as David Whyte writes in this poem, What to Remember When Waking:
“What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.”
To live wholeheartedly means to accept that you are always thrown into the open unknown, at once both liberating and disorienting. It’s definitely not for everyone.
Yet if you find yourself navigating in such wholehearted unknown, it helps to slow down and notice those small moments of emotional hiccups like that after a good decision made.
Don’t lose the loss
A good decision often has a bittersweet quality to it. All decisions, all steps forward, involve loss. The root word of “decide”, -cid and -cide, comes from Latin which means ‘cut’ or ‘kill.’ A decision, for instance, is a ‘cutting off’ of all possibilities except for one; if you are decisive you have ‘killed’ all other options. The moment when you dream has become true, you must shut off all other possibilities.
That’s a painful loss that you can’t just “suck it up and move on” as your well-intentioned friends may say. Yet, instead of letting it deter you, the better thing to do is to appreciate it.
When you begin to pause and notice the nuanced emotional impact of the decision, you begin to unpack its dark gift. In another word, when life gives you lemon, feel its sourness so that you not only know how to avoid it but also appreciate its distinct taste in your now enriched life.
Why not just suck it up, move on and do more for the world?
When we choose who we become by making a hard decision, our usual unconscious patterns of acting, what we often call “ego”, would first be knocked out of its comfortable routine.
Yet, while the pain or discomfort maybe a necessary stimulus for growth, you don’t have to be so harsh to say to yourself “such a small thing, suck it up and move on”. Having been so growth-driven the type A way, I used to do that to myself and then got even more frustrated on why it didn’t really work. I realized that ironically enough, sometimes what seems outwardly fearless like that is actually a reactive response out of fear of facing one’s internal disarray.
Now I know better.
Indeed, the more compassionate and actually more effective response is “Ouch, that hurts. Are you ok? Take your time, breathe, and when you are ready let’s continue.”
Our personality, the poor ego that often has a bad rap, is a part of us too. It is as real as the horizon is real, and needs to be treated with such care.
While the growth journey is never ending and there will be more and more of those psychological chiropractic, we the growth-oriented type don’t have to add on growth stimulus all the time. Taking little moments like those will allow for a much smoother transitioning to a deeper alignment between all parts of us and how we play a role in the greater world where we belong. An integrated, healthy psyche that knows its deeper purpose, to use the technical parlance.
Yes, you’ve got to crawl out of your own shelf, but do it with appreciation and respect for the current shelf please.
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See the full post here on Medium
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
(many!)
First is this wonderful interview with David Whyte on Curious Human podcast. David Whyte in his poetic eloquence dances around the narrow space we have around certain meanings of our lives and compels us to see slightly beyond the fixed contours.
While I keep reminding myself that wisdom cannot be imparted (ala Siddhartha) because it comes from direct experience, I do know from my experience that it can definitely be prepared for, at least mentally, by hearing words of the wise elders.
Vulnerability:
“is not a weakness a passing in disposition or something that we can arrange to do without. Rather, it's a kind of gravitational field an edge between what you know about yourself and what you don’t, what you know about your world and what you don’t know. And it’s living on that frontier edge knowing that there are larger things in the world that can take you out.
[...]
When you have that vulnerability you actually pay a scintillating kind of attention to your environment that you wouldn’t if you had constructed an identity where you’re under the illusion that you felt safe.“
A scintillating kind of attention to life and its details: imagine how enriched our perception would be :-)
On Courage
“To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or to do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply, and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. [...] To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.”
As I’ve written before in my own sitting with heartbreak, we already know what we deeply care about, “from a person, a community to a future, a possibility in society or to an unknown that begs us on and always has beg us on.”
We just have to stay in that awareness, in our body and our heart to guide us. Courage is to stay close to the way we are made.
On Ambition
“So there’s nothing wrong in the early stages of maturity and using the word ambition so long as you’re willing to let it go, once you really understand what’s occurring in your work, which will take you places that you didn’t want to go and didn’t think you had to go. And you will have to let go of what you thought your ambitions would bring you and be humbled and be apprenticed to something much larger.”
Reading this quote gave me shrill! With more lived experienced of this courageous staying close to the work I care a lot about, I’m more and more resonating with this phrase “Work is love made visible“ (Khalil Gibran)
Where is the love in this work, and what is that love feels like? What’s the real, deeper work that is happening?
Usually I’d resist “What? Taking me to places I didn’t want to go and didn’t think I’d have to go? No way!!” but hearing it from a wise elder whom I respect is both comforting and scary... I’ve been reflecting about the difference between Ambition & Aspiration, which is why I came upon my buddy Paul’s Twitter thread. More to write about it next time.
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Second is this great column by David Brooks on Joy and Happiness
“Happiness usually involves a victory for the self. Joy tends to involve the transcendence of self. Happiness comes from accomplishments. Joy comes when your heart is in another.”
I don’t have a lot of happiness it seems.. but I do have some joy and so far it’s working out quite well 🤟
“Lovers stand face to face staring into each other’s eyes. But friends stand side by side, staring at the things they both care about. Friendship is about doing things together. So people build their friendships by organizing activities that are repeated weekly, monthly or annually: picnics, fantasy leagues, book clubs, etc.”
Cheers to book club, dance floors, cookout, tea gathering <3
“They say that love is blind, but the affection friends have for each other is the opposite of blind. It is ferociously attentive. You are vulnerable, and your friend holds your vulnerability. He pauses, and you wait for him. You err, and she forgives.”
Thinking about the moments of dancing on the floor as a microcosm of friendship: if we want to dance well, together, we must be ferociously attentive to each other’s steps. It’s like that for friendship, albeit much harder because of temporal and physical distance.
“Vulnerability is the only means we have to build relationships, and relationships are the only means we have to experience joy.”
“My friend Catherine Bly Cox observed that when her first daughter was born she realized she loved her more than evolution required. I love that phrase because it speaks to what is distinctly human, our complex and infinite caring for one another.”
What a nice message to end the newsletter!
Lastly..
Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be helpful.