Something interesting I noticed while in the midst of the decision-making I was talking about in the last post.

I’m not stupid; or, rather, I am sometimes quite stupid, and so I didn’t hesitate to ask friends who I know and trust for advice. The feedback I got was interesting.

• A friend who lives an enthusiastically controlled life as a bachelor (unless you count his cat) with gracefully minimalist tendencies recommended I find a place to live alone, to “monk it up” as he put it.
• Another who has built a household full of interesting people who she cares dearly about suggested that there was room in the house for me, as well, so that I would have a place of shelter while life calmed down a bit.
• A colleague who works with the iconography of the tarot offered to do a reading for me, and laid out the cards to talk about the two possibilities that I’d narrowed down. The cards were, of course, a bit vague, but it was interesting hearing how she interpreted the symbolism (the six of bottles is a scary card!)
• An ex-girlfriend who has very strong ties to her family suggested that I should get back close with my daughters and grandkids and help them out.
• Someone who has only recent learned the skill of trusting self-knowledge is very invested in the idea of me moving far away from Seattle. The advice from this person? Simply “I’ll wait,” seeming to trust that I would simply make the decision to travel when I was ready.
• A client who has recently made a decision not to travel too much basically said “I don’t know where you should go, but wherever it is, you should stay there, and not travel so much!”

The thing I found interesting in all these offers of advice is the way they were reflective of the lives of the people who were giving the advice. It made me wonder if it is really possible to give objective advice, or if we always tend to filter it through the lens of our own experiences.

The other interesting thing, to me, is that none of them gave bad advice. Any one of them not only had good reasons for giving advice, but also simply gave good, solid advice. This isn’t about a right or wrong decision; what happens will simply be different depending on what I choose. It’s up to me to make whatever future that entails into a good one.

It’s not every day that life gives you such a clear reminder of what every single moment actually is: what you make of it.