How do you make up your mind?

You just do, you say? Come now. Nothing “just happens.” For every effect there’s a cause. Your mind has something on its mind.

Cognitive scientists talk neurons, linguistics, semiotics, big words I can’t define much less decode. In its pursuit of truth, science ignores the amateur’s ability to comprehend, bushwhacking ever deeper into expertise and techno-talk. Freud and Jung invented a different kind of storytelling, more comprehensible, but often implausible. (Do I really want to kill my father and marry my mother? You didn’t know my mother.)

I favor a corporate decision-making model. Businesses make choices based on input from various departments. You’ve got a new gizmo – should you develop it? Check with R and D, manufacturing, sales, delivery, market analysis, finance, the boss’s biases. Some departments are passionate, some tepid, some fulminous in their advocacy or resistance. Debates can get hot. At the end of the day, a decision is taken, one or another point of view prevails, and the group combines to go for the gold and win one for the Gipper, high-fives all around, dissenters be damned.

Peering inward – into my brain’s murk – I can make out these department heads:

·      Desire

·      Ambition

·      Calculation

·      Fatigue (Inertia)

·      Vanity

·      Greed

·      Hostility (Defiance)

·      Timidity

·      Morality

·      Common Sense

There may be others. Consultations occur “behind closed doors.” Each of these departments has sub-heads, who advise their manager.

You might wonder Common Sense is not installed as CEO of this team of rivals. Would it were so. Sometimes, corporations promote the sensible, often not. The other day I purchased and devoured a pint of coffee chocolate-chip ice-cream (Haagen-Dasz, screw the umlaut), having vowed to lose weight. Cardiologist, Couture, Vanity, Calculation, Morality, Ambition, pretty much the whole crew counseled against. Why, you might ask, did I succumb? Was I starving? A revolutionary – or undercover agent for the Fat team? Was I insane? Not that I know. Desire was on a tear – that’s my only excuse – and the rest of the team shrugged to hell with it, they’d clean up the mess after.

I’ve always envied humans whose internal committee conduced to do the right thing. They did their homework on time, kept their noses clean, followed instructions, chose the optimal mate and career, no problem. My decision-making apparatus has always been an exhausting fracas. Whatever I decided to do, I wanted to be doing something else. In harness, I dreamed of freedom; free, I longed to be saddled. Just now I want to be swimming, not typing. Like Zerlina, courted by Don Giovanni in his eponymous opera, “Vorrei e non vorrei,” I want to and I don’t – simultaneously – incessantly! How I rue being me – and revel in the complexity. What my internal confab has taught me over the years!

My experience managing me has made me a skeptic and relativist. What I think is never what I think – not exclusively – I can argue either side. Certainty is the redoubt of fools. Whoever knows for sure has stopped thinking. No one has a lock on righteousness. Each of us can defend – or explain away – our decisions.

The more keen one’s consciousness, the more complex one’s navigation through time. Every choice precludes others – no doubt preferable. My remorse is acute – I’m not who I had in mind – but then, I had so many me’s in mind!

My solution to this tumult – my management m.o., you might say – is (as you may have noticed) to keep on talking. I’m determined to choose wisely, knowing I won’t. I’ve even learned to forgive myself – sometimes – when I get it wrong.