postcards from nowhere

Greetings!

I spent some time with my delightful friend Deb today, who is one of 
the most positive, radiant, and uplifting people I know.  She shared 
with me a juicy tidbit of wisdom that her mom used to say to her 
whenever she was faced with making a yes or no decision:

If you have to think hard about it, it's probably not a yes. 

Skeptic that I am, I immediately ran this through my mental archives 
to see if this was true for me.  Could it really be this simple?

It was. 

Now that's powerful.  And I've heard it before.  There's a song on 
the radio with the words seems to me that "maybe" pretty much always 
means "no".  And my closest friend had a teacher who used to say if 
it's not a big yes, it's a no.  But for some reason today it really 
sunk in.

On the way home I attempted to tally up all the time I've spent over 
the years deliberating while trying to make a decision.  Sheepishly, 
I realized that applying this wisdom could have sheared months, 
maybe even years, of stress and anxiety off my life!  Ah well, 
what's done is done.  It's not too late to make a change.

Deliberation, when I pay very close attention to it, reveals itself 
as the process by which I try to convince myself that I hear a yes 
inside me that doesn't exist.  Usually I try to manufacture a yes 
when I'm afraid of the consequence or outcome that might result 
from a no.  I invest a significant amount of time and energy to 
sell myself on the deception.  And for a while, I'm happy with my 
purchase.  Things stay cool, I stay in familiar territory, and 
no one gets hurt. 

But experience has shown me that a yes that is the result of 
deliberation is nothing more than a delayed no.  Without the 
support and resources of a real yes behind it, there's not enough 
to sustain the cover-up.  Eventually I run out of energy to keep 
deceiving myself, and my truth has its way with my life.  

And when that finally happens, the very pain I feared in the first 
place has only intensified during the delay.  It would have been 
kinder and gentler to acknowledge the absence of yes right away.

It's hard to live this way. Simple, but not easy.  And kind of scary.  
It requires a certain level of faith and trust in life.  But I'll 
tell you ... I suspect that the acceptance, positive attitude, and 
generosity that Deb radiates might be attributed in part to living 
from this principle.  Her energy is not tied up in deliberating, 
so it flows out into the world as love.  

More people like her in on this planet would be a very good thing.  
So I'm going to try it out.  If you decide to try it too, let me 
know how it goes.  (thanks, Deb!)

Thanks for reading-

karen

p.s. Look at what I just noticed when I proofread this:  
deliberate = de + liberate   I'm no Latin scholar, but that 
sure looks a lot to me like it means 'taking away freedom!' 
hmmm ...