Addendum

"We are dealing with primal forces of nature here.  When primal forces of nature tell you to do something, the prudent thing is not to quibble over details."
Kevin Costner, in Field of Dreams (1989)

I really wanted to write about The Expendables 2.  I have not been this excited about a movie in a very long time.  However, today is, once again, not that day to discuss it.  It will be soon...trust me.  But I think there's some unfinished business to attend to.  And I know that I said I wouldn't talk about personal growth and all that nancy stuff, but this is my blog so ya'll can just bear with me.  Thanks.  Anyway, last night I wrote about being confused.  It's true.  Life is confusing.  There are so many choices to make on any given day, and we don't always know the ramifications of those choices until much later.  When we make decisions, oftentimes it seems that consequences are the last thing on our mind.  It is so difficult to make a fully informed decision, understanding all plausible outcomes and being cognizant of everybody that could possibly be affected.  Society has become so focused on quick decision-making and, to an extent, selfish desires.  I am certainly not above this, as much as I wish I could say that I were.  I am neither a product of my environment, nor am I renaissance man.  I am, like so many other people out there, merely trying to figure out the most confusing things in life and, beyond that, life in general.

It would be pretty easy, in theory, to just whip out the utility calculus worksheet and analyze every decision in terms of the amount of happiness gained or lost.  Jeremy Bentham would be happy at least.  But sometimes that is just not an option.  It's so crazy to consider how quickly we (and I'm definitely using "we" to include myself) make decisions.  These choices carry a ton of weight, and yet we are expected to make them at the snap of a finger.  And once they've been made, we're to embrace them completely.  The prevailing wisdom seems to be that there's no going back.  But I, at least, have made quite a habit of going back.  That's what makes life so confusing.  I think there are re-dos on decisions, but only certain ones.  Johnny over there may say that all choices are final, as if he's a sales clerk at Sears.  Sally may say that all decisions are refundable. David may defer on his decision-making to Sara.  Nick makes his choices based on something else entirely.  The point is we are not alike.  I wish that we were.  Okay, maybe I take that back...it would be not be very fun if everybody was exactly the same.  But in this instance?  Or other confusing times?  Sign me up.

How do I relate this back to Field of Dreams?  Sometimes things come up in life that don't have a clearly defined outcome.  I hope that this much has been made clear.  It's our nature (just my nature?) to think about the details...most of the time.  And the other times?  I live the devil-may-care, consequences be damned lifestyle.  I guess it comes down to consistency.  Humans are not machines.  We don't have that switch that tells us how to react to every different possibility.  With machines, the choices are finite in number and there's always a clearly defined input/output.  But when it comes to humans, our choices are infinite, as are our ways to approach them.  So when I make a choice one way, and my buddy makes a choice the other way, it ends up confusing me.  That's what I'm trying to get at...life is confusing.  I can only control one brain, in a world made up of 7 billion of them.  That's a lot of different decision making coming into play.

And that's when we return to "primal forces of nature."  I can only think on a personal level right here.  Sometimes I am faced with those decisions that seem so right to me, and yet so messed up to someone around the corner.  I think that these are primal forces telling me to do something, but the thing is I am the only one who feels that way about a particular force!  Nobody is going to fully understand the reason I do certain things, or the reasons I refrain from others.  No amount of explanations will ever do them justice.  And that leads us back to our discussion of a few days ago about perception.  When it comes to my decision making process, I am the only one who can totally grasp my personal pulls and sways.  But unfortunately I'm not the only one who is affected by them.  That's where the confusion sets in.  I can control my choices, but I cannot control the reactions to them.  Confusing...