Decisions, Transitions and Intuitions
Last week, I worked to the accompaniment of cheers and popping corks, as Cambridge graduations took place at the Senate House, across the street from my office.
Like any life transition, graduation comes with a vertiginous mixture of hope and excitement, fear and trepidation. It can feel like the moment in a circus act where the acrobat lets go of one trapeze, trusting their timing and momentum to carry them safely across to the next. A leap of faith.
When we leave something behind - whether that’s a degree, a job, a career, or a relationship - it’s not unusual to want as much certainty as possible that what we do next will be the right thing.
We might know what our friends think is right, or what seems right on paper. But when there is any ambiguity, we often want the reassurance of a gut feeling.
So, in the heightened state that often accompanies big decisions and life transitions, we parse our emotional experience and ask ‘what is this feeling telling me?’
Specifically, we want to know ‘what is this feeling telling me to do?’
We hope that the feeling can reveal a fundamental truth about an uncertain situation, or a reliable prediction about the future.
Our wish to be guided by gut feelings often expresses the not unreasonable longing not to have to choose. We’re overwhelmed with information. Maybe there are no good options, or maybe we are struggling to choose among many. We don’t know what to do.
We want to tap into a font of human wisdom that is more powerful than our exhausted, rational minds.
But we also need that wisdom to be right.
And if a decision we make doesn’t lead to the outcome we’d hoped for, it can leave us blaming our faulty feelings. Maybe we’re just plumbed in wrong to the font of human wisdom.
This makes any subsequent decision that much harder, because our sense of self-competence is now riding on it, too.
Many spiritual traditions recognise the human desire to control our destiny, and the closely related desire to be held and guided by a benign force.
And most are clear in the message that, while we have the freedom and responsibility to choose our actions, ultimately the outcome is out of our hands - and there is no guarantee that our good decisions will be rewarded (in this life, at least). We are invited to trust, without knowing - and warned that there will be times when this feels impossibly difficult.
A lot of nuance is lost when these ideas get translated into secular, capitalist pop psychology. A prevailing message many of us have grown up with is that we have the answers within us - the implication being that we have the right answers, that will pay off in this life.
So at moments of pressure, it is to our own feelings that we look for divine intervention.
Our feelings offer valuable information.
But only if we don’t railroad them into making unambiguous decisions about complex situations, or expect them to predict the future. Feelings aren’t facts.
The more we know about our feelings around a decision, the more cognitive space we free up to think clearly and creatively about what to do next.
Thinking of a current decision that is causing you anxiety, or a past decision that is causing you regret:
Acknowledge the feelings you have now.
See how many you can identify.
They may be mixed or contradictory.
They may concern the present, the past, or the imagined future.
Identify the feelings you have towards yourself.
Consider what you can do now to bring these feelings into a more tolerable range.
Consider what expectations you have of yourself about this decision
(e.g. the expectation to to stick with it / thrive in it / do it in a particular way / that it will form the basis of a particular life trajectory, etc)
Consider whether, why and how much each of those expectations matters to you now. Are there any you’ve outgrown? Are there any you could hold more loosely, or drop altogether?
Take a moment to reflect on how you feel having considered the above.
Back to the acrobat metaphor. We want to believe that the right trapeze is swinging our way and we just need to catch it.
But if we think this way, missing our moment by a fraction of a second might entail a humiliating crash to the ground, under the bright lights of the Big Top, as the crowd looks on, aghast. And this is how it often feels.
An alternative to this high-stakes imagery might be to picture instead a gibbon swinging through the rainforest.
It’s evolved to be deft, agile, and flexible. As it swings itself about, there’s no shortage of vines and branches to grab on to - though there will inevitably be bumps and bruises along the way. There’s no right or wrong route through the forest. There’s just one particular gibbon’s intentions and inclinations - which will change with the seasons and the environment across the lifespan.
My advice to last week’s new graduates, and anyone else navigating a major life transition: be more gibbon.
As ever, let me know if there are any particular topics you’d like to hear from me about. Just drop me an email - I’ll always answer.
