Back in 2016, I visited Tokyo and was told that I had to experience crossing the famous Shibuya Crossing. According to online statistics, an estimated 1,000 - 2,500 people forge their way across the intersection every two minutes, making Shibuya Crossing the world’s busiest pedestrian crossing.
It was an amazing experience. I learnt that to cross the heavily populated junctions is not so intimidating after all. It is simply a matter of “just keep walking forward”. What is really scary is standing at the cross-junction, glued and stuck to the ground, not daring to move when everyone else whizzes past you left, right and centre.
Many times in life, we reach our own Shibuya Crossing. And too often, we stand there alone, frozen, unable (or unwilling?) to decide which way to turn to cross the junction.
Caught in a seemingly endless loop of indecision, asking ourselves:
Which way should I head towards?
Is it the correct move?
Can I ever make it to the other side of the junction?
What if this is not the right path?
Analyzing ourselves to paralysis.
Blame it on our ancestors. When mankind was still wearing banana leaves as their only fashion, daily life consisted of many "one-chance only" encounters. ONE chance to kill the ferocious lion in front of them or they will become its meal; ONE chance to behead the enemy tribe's chief or they are enslaved; ONE chance to navigate correctly or they will end up in someone else's hunting traps.
We inherited this one-chance mentality up to today. It lured us into thinking that every path in front of us is a one-way traffic. Hence, every decision had better be perfect because there will be no chance to do a U-turn afterwards. This creates an inner fear that stops us from stepping out.
What we forget is that there are many different paths, and while they are all one-directional, some do criss-cross. And guess what? All paths will eventually converge and merge. We just need to let time show us how.
There is this thing called "Regret" which nobody wants in life. To avoid having any of them, we tell ourselves that we must make the right decisions every time. As a result, we are always in the process of “deciding” but never “decided”.
Here’s the unfortunate truth: we will make some bad decisions in our life that we can't undo and we will carry some regrets to our grave. Yet, these are "purposeful" regrets because our lives have been enriched from experimenting and discovering. The greatest and saddest regret is that we find out too late that we have stayed stuck in the same old place all our life, never living out our dreams.
“Regret is so mindless, because we presume that the choice we didn’t take would have been better.” - Ellen J Langer
Very often, what keeps us from taking a step forward is the worry that after choosing the other side of the field, we will realize that it is not as green as we thought it would be. But imagine how boring (and scary, to me) our life will be if we can always foretell what is going to happen next! Think of the drama shows that keep you binging against your will – I bet the plot is full of unexpected twists and turns. Life is interesting only when we allow ourselves to experience a mixture of ups and downs.
No one admits it but we all low key don't want to take the responsibility for our decisions.
Every decision has a consequence.
Every decision comes with a price .
But we would rather not be the one having to bear the consequences and pay the price.
Or worse, become the person whom others hold us responsible for what happened to them because of a choice we make.
So we stand still, hoping that someone (or something) else will help us make the decision. And that in itself comes with a price…
What is the price of not making a decision vs moving forward?
I’ll let you decide :)
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