For a long time I wasn’t very fond of making decisions because I was afraid of deciding wrong and facing the consequences of my poor choice. My motto was to never put off a decision until tomorrow what you can avoid deciding altogether. Lately I’ve realized that to date, I’ve managed to live through all of my bad choices … even the time I decided to try gas station sushi.
I think my hesitation to make definitive decisions started very early in life. I remember being a 5-year-old sitting at the dinner table trying to decide if it was better to try to eat the disgusting cottage cheese so I’d be allowed to leave the table or to refuse to eat the cottage cheese and take a spanking and being sent to my room. It was only the first of many lose-lose scenarios we all face in life.
To my horror I learned that refusing to eat the cottage cheese resulted in a spanking and then being forced to return to the table and eat the dreaded curds of death anyway. I choked down a few bites of only to immediately gag and throw them back up which resulted in yet another spanking being served another helping of cottage cheese. I remember my dad telling me I would sit there until I “learned to like it.”
Eventually I fell asleep at the table and my mother mercifully put me to bed. I never learned to like cottage cheese but I did learn that sometimes procrastination is less painful than making a decision. By simply sitting and doing nothing I was able to avoid being spanked and eating cottage cheese. It was a lesson that stayed with me for a long time but didn’t always serve me well.
As a young man I avoided making decisions with the way Hillary Clinton avoids polygraphs and Donald Trump avoids marrying American women… with zeal and passion. I drifted through my early years following the path of least resistance just going along with other people’s choices.
When I was 17 years old, I dropped out of high school, got married and joined the Navy. Before I was 21 years old I had voted for Jimmy Carter, started smoking weed, became a father, lived on an ice shelf next to an active volcano in Antarctica and bought a Chevy with a 5.7-liter V-8 engine during the gas crisis. Does any of that sound like there were decisions being made in my life? Heck, even if I had been making bad decisions I would’ve avoided a lot of that just by pure chance!
The path of least resistance led me to a small town in South Carolina in a failing marriage, living with my in-laws, in debt up to my eyeballs and stuck in a job I hated. It was just like being back at that table again facing the cottage cheese … it felt like a lose-lose scenario so I did what I did best … I smoked weed, ate Doritos and waited to fall asleep at the table.
Fortunately my father-in-law was a retired Navy Chief who had no problems making a decision. So when the day came that he was tired of me living in is house and whining about life he looked me in the eye and said the words that would change my life. He said, “Son, sometimes you just have to strap on a pair and make a decision. Get off your butt and do something even if it’s wrong!” I was pretty sure he was throwing me out of his house but I was very sure that those were words to live by.
I’ve been making my own decisions for a while now and on occasion I even get one right. The lesson I learned from him was that life is a series of decisions and if I don’t make them someone else will make them for me. I also learned that when you let someone else make your decisions you could end up eating cottage cheese or living in South Carolina. The horror!
Over the years I’ve made plenty of poor choices and I don’t regret any of them…except eating cottage cheese or maybe kissing that stripper in Singapore, but I lived. The point is that letting someone else make your decisions is worse than making a bad one of your own and this is coming from a guy who once decided to buy a ’73 Vega!
Rick Seley is an award-winning humor columnist. He may be reached at news@lahontanvalleynews.com.