When I woke up this morning, I had a whole new idea about the August theme for this blog. The word that was shouting in my head was Alternatives. “That’s interesting,” I thought. It was not at all what I’d been planning to write about.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. For the past several weeks I’ve been weighing the alternatives of staying in Las Vegas or moving to California. So the process of decision making that comes into play when considering alternatives has been vividly playing in my life.
In case I wasn’t convinced that this was a timely topic, I picked up my latest issue of Afar magazine and noticed the Subaru Outback ad on the back cover. It said, “Buy map. Throw dart.”
That’s one way of selecting from alternatives, I guess, but not exactly what I have in mind for this month’s exploration.
Let’s begin with the dictionary definition: “offering or expressing a choice.” Technically, alternatives refer to a choice between two, and only two, options. However, the more popular notion is that alternatives include a number of choices, the selection of which eliminates the others.
Of course, alternative also is used to mean “different from the usual or conventional.” So we have alternative music, newspapers, lifestyles, education, medicine and so forth.
Since I never know exactly where a theme is going to lead me, I’m going to keep looking at both definitions of the word and what it has to do with the Joyfully Jobless Journey.
The one thing I know for sure is that it’s ridiculously easy to overlook the abundance of alternatives in every situation in which we find ourselves. Too often we limit our choices to far fewer alternatives than actually exist.
As I was considering that, I remembered something Swedish actress Liv Ullmann said in her autobigraphy, Changes.
“I had a life with options but frequently lived as if I had none,” Ullmann writes. “The sad result of my not having exercised my choices is that my memory of myself is not of the woman I believe I am.”
Ullmann’s recollection might have been different had she encountered this bit of advice from British general W. J. Slim: “When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take, choose the bolder.”
Let’s make that our starting point in this August excursion.
Recent Comments