Actually, let me post this excellent piece, which is actually better than what I would have written: https://www.pensford.com/why-flattening-the-curve-is-overrated/?fbclid=IwAR0asHJdOETCjXPvM28idycyg1xn-JljKcWMtb6otp2WhW1TXZLCSIrB2RY
But what I logged on to say is it occurred to me that doing the thing you choose to do with as much love and attention as possible equals and really exceeds doing all the other things you could have done in its stead. Let’s call it the Love One is more than Like Two Principle.
As context, I will mention a line from Churchill’s excellent “Painting as a Pastime”, where he talked about looking at his library and realizing there were some books there he would never read. He would sometimes pick them up vaguely melancholically, run his hand down the spine, and read the title page and perhaps table of contents, then put it back and more or less apologize.
Me, I have perhaps 30 cookbooks. If I make a recipe from one, that means I can’t make one from another. If I pursue one workout regime I have foreclosed on the other possibilities. Or, I am doing multiple ones, each poorly, which is both comical and understandable.
What I am proposing is those of us who have problems making decisions because we are simply too aware of options can have our cake and eat it too. If you LOVE what you are doing. If you ENGAGE with your decision, then it stands in for every other possible decision. And that is the most you could have gotten from any of those decisions anyway, right?
Most of the time, if our choices are about equal, our outcomes would have been about equal. But if you dilute and divide the outcome with “what-if” thinking, then you lose on both scores. You achieve a worse result than you would have gotten with literally any choice that you had decided to love and accept and carry through fully.
This flipping through the cards is something most of us have experience with. You can scroll through PEOPLE, because nobody is quite perfect for you. But I think there was some wisdom in the Sirens of Titan, when Vonnegut said that the smartest thing to do is love fully the people who ARE in your life, versus pining across a lifetime for people who are not.
The same would apply to life generally, actually. Why not love what you are doing? Right now? This moment. Are you painting your walls? Gardening? Wondering how you are going to pay your bills? Engage with it and love it.
With regard to the last, I know from my own past economic history, you can get really creative with bill paying. I’m not sharing any details, but some of them might make you wonder “Dear God did you really get away with that?” Yes. The answer is yes. I am not and never have been a law breaker–the idea of even risking jail has no appeal to me–but I’m really, really good at identifying and using gray areas.
But hell, even if you are jail right now, reading this: what can you engage with and love? They have good libraries, I think, most of them, and if not, you can probably talk somebody into getting you some good books. You have time to meditate. Time for exercise. You could take up Tai Chi.
As I think about it, this may be the firm psychological basis behind mindfulness practice. If you are present, that means you are accepting the present. The alternative is dissociating, and finding yourself daydreaming, wishing, praying, resenting, being angry. If you are there, then some part of you has accepted what is going on, what you are doing, and the situation.
So for me particularly, I’m going to hit Ottolenghi, then my Samarkand cookbook. I haven’t made any of the plovs yet, which is kind of the core food. I bought some licorice a long time ago for meringue cookies. Whatever I make, will stand in for thousands of other recipes. I’m going to do my best to show up.