On being grown up

These past few weeks have required me to make a number of decisions on a whole range of things. There’s some on the personal side, some professional, some just plain “life” things. I hate how I get when I have to make these seemingly big choices; I just internalize and think about it until it consumes me and then suddenly I make up my mind and I’m back up again. And just when I think I could not have thought any more, I find myself revisiting the choices I’ve made only to discover there is room for more thought. I am not sure if I’m just more fickle than others – going by the track record I’m not so much, but I do tend to over analyze. It’s never a good thing I guess.

That’s the thing about being grown up. A lot of my choices and decisions have been one way streets with no room to change my mind later and with no one to look up to for advice. Some have been easy to make out of intuition and hard to back up with logic. Others have checked out fine by all sense and logic but then intuition plays spoil sport… a classic head vs heart war dance. Sometimes it’s not even so much of a choice as an attempt just to find out some options to choose from. And you know how they say life’s what happens when you’re busy making other plans? There were some things that were creeping up on me that I had no idea about until I woke up one morning and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Sigh. I have made my choices and there’s no going back now. I normally assure myself that I have done right by seeing how easily I move on after I’ve decided. In some cases in these past few weeks, I have moved on almost overnight – out with the old and in with the new. But some things have not been that easy, and there is that dull ache of regret. After a whole of quarter of making complex models to solve go/no-go issues with airlines, oil rigs and movie sequels, I discovered that unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), not all of life’s dilemmas can be represented on a decision tree with clear cut EMVs and probabilities where you just pick the best one and get on with it. If only it were that simple.