Figs and Donkeys

You know when you have the freedom to do whatever you want, sometimes you end up in this state where there are so many options in front of you, just infinite possibilities that making any choice is so overwhelming that you just become paralysed by your indecision. I’ve been like that for a long time.

I read these lines from Sylvia Plath about her sitting in a fig tree looking at the branches ahead of her. Each branch in the tree was a life path she could take; one a scholar, the other an athlete, the next a mother, and countless other branches. She sits there for so long that one by one the figs at the end of each branch wither and die, and she in turn, unable to decide which fig to have, starves to death.

There’s a similar tale – Buridan’s donkey – where a donkey is placed in between hay on one side and water on the other, the donkey can’t decide if it should go for the hay or the water for so long that it dies.

I’ve been feeling like this donkey, and like Plath, for a long time. Always in between options. It’s done serious damage to any previous mindfulness I was able to achieve so now I’m trying to look at things in a different way, and it’s working.

You see, the problem, I think, is options. I think we over present options to ourselves, I think we actually drown our dreams in a sea of options. When you have infinite options or a shit tonne of them, you force yourself to go through the ringer in a pros and cons based approach of deciding which option is better than the other without ever truly asking yourself WHAT DO YOU WANT. Not “what are the options?” but “what do you want?”.

Not an easy question to answer but it will have an answer. There will be an answer to that question and you sure as shit will not find it by analysing every possible option and working backwards through them.

While asking yourself what you want can be helpful, you may end up still spewing out more than one option, so, indecision continues. A few solutions have been offered to me through friends and through books but I think the best answer is a combination and one philosopher, Kirkegaard, sums it up pretty well.

Kirkegaard talks of this topic extensively and calls this over-optionality, and analysis of infinite possibilities, the “dizziness of freedom”. He talks of the anxiety felt in this situation and offers probably the optimal “way out” of this trap you’ve caught yourself in. “Take a leap of faith” he says. Make a decision. Pick one of your options and just commit to it.

I think if you do this, shit, I mean, if I do this, I think fairly quickly I’ll figure out whether or not the decision was the right one and then I can make a decision to carry on or to take another leap of faith, either way I won’t be starving to death in a fig tree.