Loneliness, Indecision, and the Brink

Reflections on Interview with Emily Green

“We can’t experience everything, and taking one road will always preclude another, but agonizing over which to take can eventually prevent us from knowing any road… We are beautifully limited creatures, capable of great moments of full living, but we can’t have it all or experience it all. We can only, paradoxically, experience all there is by giving ourselves completely and humbly to the small path we are drawn to.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

Indecision can be lonely. The kind of lonely that itches me awake in the first moments of sleep, the kind that pounces on me unexpectedly at parties. No one else is like you, the loneliness says. Just look at them, with their sure smiles and unperplexed eyebrows.

I am grateful to Emily Green for sharing vulnerably last week about how lonely she feels being undecided about having kids, with most people in her life firmly decided one way or the other. She shared in a raw and real way not only that she feels torn, but why, describing the appeals and drawbacks of both paths in a way that made me feel the familiar push and pull in my chest.

My many years of indecision about motherhood sometimes felt debilitatingly lonely, especially as I watched more and more people around me go on their merry knowing way toward having children or not. I’ve experienced the same couplet of indecision and loneliness while deciding what to write for my next book.

I’ve learned that I am often less alone than I think. Even if others aren’t undecided about the same things, we all know indecision. Through writing this newsletter, I’ve discovered that more people experienced indecision about having kids than I once thought.

One difference may be in how long we typically linger in indecision. Some of us dash toward decisions cheetahs, gaining momentum as we go, and others dawdle like elephants.

Like Emily, I am a big lingerer. I’m coming to accept this about myself. I am grateful for the many years I took to feel through the decision to have a baby and to feel through my first book. For me, that was the time these processes took, and I am more settled inside of myself now because of them.

But the lingering can’t last forever; at some point, even us elephants reach the brink. I start to feel a tug that comes more from my gut than my head, pulling me along by inches. The challenge then becomes, as Mark Nepo puts it, to “experience all there is by giving ourselves completely and humbly to the small path we are drawn to.”

I’ve succumbed to the fallacy of thinking that because I can imagine many paths, I can live many paths, for as long as I stay undecided. This is the fallacy Nepo gently points out when he says that we are “beautifully limited creatures” who “can’t experience everything.” It’s a fallacy that has sometimes made me stall in indecision rather than move through it. Honoring that little tug that draws me one way over another, and then giving myself over to that path, is a practice I’m still learning.