Decisions, Decisions.....

[Joe Kriston]

I remember reading an old poster somewhere that said "Not to decide is to decide"...Which reminded me a little of Yogi Berra's famous "When you come to a fork in the road, take it" line...I think the older you get, the more you realize that making the right or wrong decision is not as important as living with the decisions you make...

Obviously, there's no magic formula for making right decisions, since none of us can predict the future...When we choose one thing over another, we never get to know how the 'other' would have turned out...Even if we could know, what would be the point?...Most decisions you can't take back----not very easily, anyway...We put off decisions, hoping that the right choice will somehow be made clearer than it is right now...We all hate to admit that we made a bad decision...

When faced with a big decision, I don't know that I really have a tried and true formula that works...However, I do find that after exhausting whatever common sense I can muster up in choosing among certain options, it's often a little insignificant thing---maybe something that tugs me emotionally just a little bit---that ends up being the deciding factor...When we bought our house 23 years ago, it fit all the criteria we were looking for in a house, yard size, square footage, price range etc.---along with about a dozen other houses...Why did we choose this one over the others?...When I walked over to the storage shed in the back yard, I noticed on the concrete slab it was sitting on five various sized hand prints of the kids that lived in the house previously....I looked at the hand prints and then the back yard and said " we could raise a family in this house"...And we bought it....

I have a local friend, a long-haired Polish Jew with a French accent, who recently has literally been faced with making a life or death decision...A proud man of 55, he suffered a heart attack last fall...He was immediately taken to a heart hospital and there he had a couple of stints put in his arteries to clear up some blockage he had...He was released from the hospital a couple of days later, and that's when the fun started...Throw away the cigarettes...Lose the six cups of coffee a day...No more making gravy out of the grease...And he felt weak...Then the depression sets in...Time goes by and he isn't feeling much better...He returns to the doctor...Now the doctor wants to do open-heart bypass surgery...How much more depressing can it get?...

As I said, he is a proud man...He doesn't trust doctors....He doesn't want to leave his life totally in their hands....He's never depended upon anybody before...He certainly doesn't want to be indebted to them---not for the money but for saving his life...A person's whole philosophy of life can change when they're staring the devil in the face and they're relying on another human being to rescue them...

He asked about his options....How bad is his blockage?...Sure, he can change his ways, eat better and take better care of himself, but will he be able to live with himself?...Will he worry himself sick every time his heart starts racing or he has heartburn, wondering if this is "the big one"?...He read about alternatives...There is a strict, fat-free vegetarian diet out there that can slow down, if not stop the blockage in his arteries...We talked...We knew he was at the fork in the road...He hadn't "taken it" yet...He had the bypass surgery scheduled, then canceled it..He hadn't made a decision, he delayed it, and he knew it...

Seems like the easier decision to live with is to get the surgery...Of course, there's a one percent chance he'd die on the operating table...Then he has to live out his life knowing he owes it to another man...The only advice I could give him is that if he opts not to do the surgery, that it's a decision and not a postponement...He believes in the power of will and of the mind...Procrastination can be fatal...

It's been four months since he canceled the surgery...He actually enjoys his vegetable diet, his tea, an occasional snort of booze and sneaks a smoke every now and then...He feels much better and his doc says he's improving, and even has a high opinion of the doctor who wrote the book that he got his diet from...He's certainly not out of the woods, but he's alive,....and he seems to be living with his decision...What more can a person do?....

[Ronold F. Wallace]

I made a decision to write something. I have to agree that sometimes even when presented with all known variables, sooner or later you have to make a decision and stick with it. Whether right or wrong the decision has to be carried through. I have found with time that with the decision it can be modified cuz it isn't written in stone. I am glad we are not robots. I believe that people when asked with what they would do, offer a gammit of things to do with your decision making process. I have learned to not be bullyied into a someone elses decision but to live with it.

[David Bailey]

I have pondered this in my life. The more older i get the more i say " to hell with this attitude" i am going to live the way i do until the day i die, my kids know this, and all my friends, and i am living it amen!
Great story Joe. May you local friend live on till he is unable to live, that's the way i look at life...rock on till ya can't. Looking forward to telling your friend, happy 90th birthday!