To make a decision, to decide on anything at all, even remotely, is to set things in motion, things we may not want to happen by the time they have snowballed into something we could not have known. This is what life is about. There are moments when we must decide something, and there are times we must bear whatever they brought forth. But between them are days, which often stretch to absurdly long stretches of years and decades, where we can only sit and watch things unfold, when we simply have to adjust day after day to the sinuous meanders made by the river of time, to the many blockades made by the boulders of circumstance, to the debilitating exhaustion of existence.
Sometimes, you are propelled early into a decision; you jump the gun as if running a sprint as the people watching, in the stands of your life, snicker at you. You reach it before your time, like the friend who persistently arrives an hour before everyone else. It is impatience, not punctuality, that causes this, and while it is as absent in my life as dew on grass on a scorching hot afternoon, there once was enough impatience in me that it trickled down into everyone. Haste was all I knew, and panic was all I could induce in others. Now, it is different, of course. A few decisions led me here, but I did not know that was the reward at the end of the tunnel. A reward may be hyperbole, of course, because as consequences often tend to be, the ones I faced were heavy and ponderous, and, fittingly, they taught me there is no place for haste when the road is long and dark. All of that is in the past, of course, and is now but a reminder of all the platitudes I have about patience, the importance of taking a breath now and then, the significance of stopping, of where I got them from.
And now, I have made a few decisions, too. What they are is irrelevant, but I know I have set things in motion again. It scares me a little, but there is no other way. I must live through the in-between again before seeing what has become of them. But the pebble has begun rolling downhill. That much, I am certain of.