The Best Decisions Are Slow Decisions

Whenever I’m facing an important decision, there’s one thing I’ve learned to avoid.

Rushing into anything.

Urgency has a wonderfully convincing voice. It whispers that you need to decide today. That if you don’t act immediately, you’ll miss your chance. Everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, so why are you still hesitating?

It sounds remarkably persuasive.

It is also often remarkably, utterly and completely wrong.

I’ve noticed that people going through a major life change frequently become impatient with themselves. The marriage has ended, so they feel they should know what comes next. They’ve retired, so they think they ought to have discovered a new purpose by Tuesday. Redundancy arrives on Friday, and by Monday morning they’re scrolling through job adverts, convinced they must replace not only their income but also their identity.

As though uncertainty were a problem to be solved as quickly as possible.

I understand the temptation. Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It sits beside us at three o’clock in the morning, asking awkward questions we’d much rather postpone until daylight. Given the choice, most of us would gladly exchange uncertainty for almost anything else.

But discomfort isn’t always a sign that something has gone wrong.

Sometimes it’s simply the feeling of a life rearranging itself.

One of the reasons I love walking is that it teaches us something modern life keeps encouraging us to forget.

You can only take one step at a time.

The path unfolds gradually. You notice the scent of pine warming in the sunshine, the rhythmic chorus of cicadas in the long grass, the crunch of gravel beneath your boots. Every so often, you reach the top of a hill and realise the view was hidden until you climbed high enough to see it.

Life has a curious habit of unfolding the same way.

Gradually, you become aware of a vague feeling that something no longer fits. Then comes a conversation that lingers in your mind for days. A book that seems to have been written just for you. A walk during which the same thought returns again and again until it quietly refuses to be ignored.

Looking back, it can all seem perfectly obvious.

Accepting it is another matter entirely.

We like to imagine that wise decisions are made by gathering enough information. There is certainly some truth in that. But I’ve also noticed that there comes a point when more information simply creates more noise.

It’s rather like trying to see your reflection by constantly stirring the water.

At some stage, you have to stop.

You have to let the water become still.

Only then does the picture emerge.

That doesn’t mean doing nothing.

Waiting wisely is very different from avoiding difficult decisions. One is an active process of paying attention. The other is simply procrastination wearing a respectable disguise.

The challenge is learning the difference.

I’ve come to think that some of the most important work we do during big changes is invisible. While we imagine we’re “doing nothing”, we’re actually grieving, questioning, noticing, letting go and slowly becoming the person who will eventually be capable of making the decision.

Perhaps that’s why answers rarely arrive when we chase them.

They tend to appear when we create enough space for them to catch up with us.

Why, then, do we expect ourselves to make life’s biggest decisions at breakneck speed?

If you’re standing at a crossroads today, wondering which direction to take, perhaps the wisest thing you can do is resist the pressure to figure everything out right away.

Gather information.

Take long walks.

Sleep on it.

Pray, if that’s part of your life.

Because the best decisions are rarely the ones we make in a panic.

More often, they’re the ones that emerge slowly, like when the morning mist lifts from a valley to reveal a path that was there all along.

You simply couldn’t see it yet.