The difficulty of making a decision

One of the issues I’ve been writing about recently in this blog is how much we need to know before we can make the decision to change. I suggested that waiting to have all the facts in front of you is not necessarily the best thing to do if you want to make radical changes in your life.

This problem fits rather well with a quite daunting quote from Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship that I’m circling my way around at the moment:

“without the opening of an absolutely undetermined possible, without the radical abeyance and suspense marking a perhaps, there would never be either event or decision. Certainly. But nothing takes place and nothing is ever decided without suspending the perhaps while keeping its living possibility in living memory. If no decision (ethical, juridical, political) is possible without interrupting determination by engaging oneself in the perhaps, on the other hand, the same decision must interrupt the very thing that is its condition of possibility: the perhaps itself” (p67)

Although we use the word decision in any number of different situations, Derrida reserves ‘decision’ for those times when the correct course of action cannot be calculated or determined. That is, for Derrida, a true decision cannot be automatic or simply a matter of course. Instead decisions require us to be open to unforeseeable possibilities, we must not really know what we are getting ourselves into.

We can see this in the kinds of decisions necessary to be able to change careers, move cities, forgive a friend. In each case what is necessary is a ‘leap of faith’ since none of these decisions are infallible, in a large part because we never have enough knowledge to accurately predict how each of these decisions will turn out. While this kind of leap is always intimidating, as we saw in regard to the safe-keeping self, the desire to have all the facts keeps us stuck repeating the same actions and living the same life, making radical change impossible.

On the other hand, one of the problems of opening yourself up to new possibilities is the variety of options which then present themselves to you. When you take away the guidelines you previously used to live your life, almost anything becomes possible. This is why Derrida then argues that at a certain point this openness to possibility has to be interrupted. To decide is therefore to be caught in a paradox; on the one hand a decision is only possible by being open to strange new possibilities, but on the other hand you also have to interrupt this openness in order to commit yourself to a particular path. Needless to say, the responsibility required by this understanding of decision-making can be terrifying. This is why Derrida writes that the ability to make a decision requires

“a certain type of resolution and singular exposition at the crossroads of chance and necessity” (p30).

We must expose ourselves to chance, to the unpredictable and the unknowable if we are to exceed our known world, the world we are comfortable and familiar with. But out of what is offered to us in this exposure, something must be chosen, must become necessary for us to do, otherwise we remain paralysed in the face of these new possibilities.

I don’t think that Derrida’s ideas here makes it any easier to make decisions, he actually makes it harder. But I do think that he shows what is involved in making a decision that bring about changes in our lives rather than one that keeps us stuck in the same old situations.

 

When swimming…

Gosh, two weeks without a post, yes I have excuses – moving in to a new flat and finding out that the phone line has been ripped out of the socket – but who needs excuses .

My mother, sister and I went swimming this morning – the water was freezing cold – and we all stood around for quite a while waiting for when we would dive in. It’s funny how all the self-talking and badgering you do still doesn’t help you take the plunge. Instead it seems to happen all of a sudden.

But what is it that happens in between. Where does decision take place? How is it made? It doesn’t seem to be a conscious thing, at least not something occurring in the talking, wondering, cajoling part of your consciousness… Its a curious thing, but seems important because I still credit the ability to make decisions to that part of my awareness despite myself.

What would it mean to take seriously this moment of unconsciousness in the middle of decision making?

 

Trying to find guarantees

I’m noticing that one of the funny things about making major changes in your life is how superstitious you can get. I find my little chattering brain, presumably in an attempt to be helpful, starts to look for ’signs’. Everything becomes potentially meaningful. The weather, bird calls, cloud patterns, seaweed tossed up on the beach, strange looks from people in the street, each one pondered over for its secret meaning.

I suppose when you remove all the usual guidelines for your life it becomes much harder to judge how you are going. You are usually heavily dependent on other people and the decisions they make, often using unknown criteria.

What I find interesting is the way my brain still tries to find ways to make me feel in control of my own destiny, even when they are as ridiculous promising myself that I’ll find a perfect flat if I can just walk down this path without stepping on the cracks .

 

Where to start?

When I was young and made plans for doing things I’d calculate everything out neatly, having the whole room clean by Saturday, enough money saved up by the end of November, reading two pages of a book every day. Inevitably things went haywire and I got off track. There was always something not perfect enough. It was frustrating and made me feel helpless, I was always waiting for the right conditions for things to begin.

Now I have a note on my computer that says – Begin Anywhere.

It reminds me to stop searching for the right place to start because I don’t have to start with the right thing I just have to do something.

 

Making changes when you are feeling confused

It’s so tempting to stop pursuing changes in your life when you are feeling confused. The sensible thing to do seems to be to wait it out while you gather your thoughts. As my mother always told me when I was little – “if you get lost, just stop, wait where you are”.

But what if this isn’t always the best approach?

When we are dealing with an over-active safe-keeping self confusion can actually be a way of keeping you stuck. You stop and wait, trying to gather your thoughts, all the while growing more confused and distressed. Worst of all you start doubting even those things you should be sure of. As a little kid, lost in a mall you start thinking perhaps you should go look in the food-court, perhaps you should go back to the car, perhaps no-one really cares that you are lost, perhaps…. You start wandering around but without any purpose, you get another bright idea to try the department store. Your situation gets worse and you can’t find a way out.

Bolles suggests that when the safe-keeping self is using confusion as a way of keeping you ’stuck’ the best remedy is not to focus on what you don’t know, but to try to anchor yourself in what you do know. Try to figure out what it is that you can hold on to with certainty, even while confusion wails around you like the Sirens around Ulysses. Hold on to that one thing tenaciously, even if it is as simple as “I am unhappy”. This will be the ground that you can build your changes upon.

And remember that your mother didn’t only say “if you get lost, just stop, wait where you are,” she also said “I’ll find you”.

 

On the safe-keeping self and being ’stuck’

There is a section in the popular career guide What Colour is Your Parachute? called – How to Get “Unstuck” . I randomly came across it while I was flipping through the book at a bookstore. When I eventually read it, sitting at the kitchen table procrastinating yet again, I cried all the way through.

For the last three years I seem to have been in hibernation. I’ve not been happy with where I live, what I do, or the path which seemed to be in front of me. I never wrote in my journal, never really analysed my life, and was too afraid to change anything. Every time I did think about my situation I couldn’t see a way out. None of my options seemed reasonable or sensible, I kept telling myself to just to put up with things, wait them out, or ignore them. Trouble is this continued for three years, three years of the only life I’m ever going to have.

I had thought the reason I couldn’t change was because there really weren’t any good options available to me. But when I read this section of Richard Bolles’ book I realised that the problem had not been lack of options, but rather the way I had been looking for these options.

In describing how to get unstuck Richard Bolles talks about two aspects of the self – the safekeeping self and the experimental self. The first is primarily logical and the second works through intuition. The safekeeping self always needs good reasons to change, it avoids risks, avoids getting things wrong, punishes itself for making mistakes, is cautious and suspicious, and generally is fearful. As depressing as it sounds, this was the primary way I had been approaching the problem – I had been trying to find the ‘right’ thing to do.

And this is what upset me so much. I had been tricking myself all this time. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t have the right option available, but rather that I had becoming overly dependent on my safekeeping self for advice. I realised that attempting to change through logical, rule governed behaviour is self-defeating since these are the primary tools of the safe-keeping self. As Bolles writes, even though this part of your self might insist that it is the best one to help you out, it is lying! Instead, what can help you make changes is being open to the unexpected, to things which are surprising or even seemingly irrelevant, i.e. the gifts of chance.

 

Dangerous Dichotomies

One element which I think is important in working for change is avoiding the temptation to think in abstract dichotomies. Dichotomies most often produce a stalemate between those for or against. Ultimately, they reduce the ways you can think about a situation and hide the larger contexts which produce the dichotomy. In so doing they restrict which options which seem to be available for action. One of the primary examples of this is the abortion debate.

Quite a few years ago, an extreme anti-abortion group, who claim that abortion is genocide, set up shop at my university campus. This sparked a massive debate around the university which was violent and polarised. While this was an important and necessary debate, what was ignored in fighting over the status of the fetus was the larger social context in which this debate took place. That is, the choice to continue a pregnancy is generally not based on how the fetus is defined, but on larger social issues, including the low status of single mothers, the lack of support both financial and emotional and the lack of flexibility among employers and educational institutions. However, when I asked a pro-life campaign group what support they provided to new mothers I received the answer “I think we might have some second-hand clothes somewhere”…

Dichotomies drain away energy so that it becomes harder and harder to see what can be done. However from a larger perspective there is often a great deal of productive work which needs to be done and which would benefit everyone. In this case, fighting for better child-care, better maternity/paternity leave, more flexibility within the work environment, and fighting against ignorant attitudes to single mothers and against the isolation often involved in child-rearing.

 

Responding to demands for change.

A post inspired by Casaubon’s Book: The Familiarity of an Idea

It’s always hard to find ways of connecting Derrida’s work to everyday life – I find that it does, every now and again, but often his work is alienating, esoteric and intimidating. Reading the above post from Causabon’s book was one of the times when it did connect.

Derrida’s work is the focus of quite a few of my thesis chapters. One section focuses on Derrida’s discussion of invention. One of the paradoxes of invention is that it involves making room for the absolutely new to enter into our understandings. One thing Derrida points out about this, is that in a sense this is impossible. We are only able to recognise those things which we have at least some familiarity, or things which can be compared with something we already know. If something is completely new we effectively have no way of comprehending it.

This opens up interesting and frightening questions for social change, particularly in our current situation where our ability to survive global warming and the depletion of world oil reserves appears to demand the development of ways of life which are pretty much unimaginable from our current situation.

However one of the interesting ways Derrida’s work can help us negotiate this impasse is in his focus not on what these ways of life might be exactly, but rather on the way the demand itself works. Often a demand is contained within certain context which allows us to know what must be done in order to meet the demand. For example, if I am told to return an overdue library book, I understand clearly what is being asked of me. I understand the context surrounding the demand – I know what a book is, what a library is, what overdue means, and I understand why this is being demanded of me.

However this is only one kind of demand that I can experience. Another is one which is devoid of context, one which is a demand for something so new and radical that I do not have the experience or the understanding to know clearly what I must do and why. Even so, I feel the injunction to act and I know I must act.

There are a variety of different ways we can respond to this, three that I can think of include; 1. I can try to ignore the injunction to act 2. I can act immediately, forcing the injunction into a framework I already understand or 3. I can try to respond to the demand by attempting to develop a new context or framework.

The first two responses fit into our traditional framework for deciding to act, ie the first is a refusal to respond and is thus seen as passive, while the second is an active response. The third response, however, is not quite either. Derrida argues that any attempt to force the injunction into a current framework makes us unable to welcome that which is truly new. In our attempt to welcome a radically new future, we are therefore seemingly passive. It must come to us. However, in welcoming the new, there is also room for activity in our attempts to develop spaces and gaps in our old frameworks and contexts so they are more easily reworked. Our response to the demand for change becomes an active waiting.

The demand to respond to the new is like something we can’t stop picking at, we try to ignore the demand or dismiss it, but we are constantly being brought back to worrying at it again. This process is important, as it allows us to sort through out worries and fears, while also reworking our understandings. This is why I think the demand to always be active leaves out important aspects of the process of working for change.

The process of radical change is insightfully discussed in the above post from Causabon’s book. What I love about this post is the way Sharon Astyk makes a clear case for the importance of the active process of challenging our preconceived ideas, but also points out that this process will not automatically change a person’s behaviour. Part of the process is also passive, in that we also wait for the “click” moment when the new starts to make sense, or indeed, suddenly makes complete sense. But what I love even more is the way Astyk presents clear suggestions of how to go about this type of work, without being proscriptive or dogmatic.

 

Decluttering Brings Abundance?

Seems like decluttering is my major issue at the moment as I keep stumbling across things which inspire me to do just this.

I’ve just read an article that I found through No Impact Man about the link between Charity and Wealth. Apparently it argues that the more you give the more you receive and Brooks offers a neurological reason for this:

Psychologists and neuroscientists have identified several ways that giving makes us more effective and successful. For example, new research from the University of Oregon finds that charity stimulates parts of the brain called the caudate nucleus and the nucleus accumbens, which are associated with meeting basic needs such as food and shelter—suggesting to the researchers that our brains know that giving is good for us. Experiments have also found that people are elevated by others into positions of leadership after they are witnessed behaving charitably.

from Charity Makes Wealth by Arthur Brooks

I’m not sure why the brain thinks giving is good for us. Perhaps because giving is linked to an abundance mentality and hoarding to a scarcity mentality. In any case, what this might suggest is that every time I hold onto something – because I just might need it in the future – I’m signaling to myself that I’m not safe. Whereas whenever I give something away, I’m actually signalling that I am well provided for and can now help provide for others. Maybe this is why I get such a rush from Freecycling, because it allows me to give presents to strangers.

 

A gift for my de-cluttering effort

I’m reading Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice for my chapter on theories of community and came across this quote from Emmerson:

Things are in the saddle
and ride mankind.

Walzer is talking about ideas of distributive justice, but Emerson’s quote is just the incentive I need to drastically cut down my possessions, i.e. the things that possess me .

I’ve been doing alright cutting down my book collection but am getting stuck with old University notes, collections of readings, collections of train tickets from overseas etc etc. I’m not sure what I’m keeping them for…maybe they are actually trying to keep me )