Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

What I was noticing with all this crazy weather (for those of you reading this in another place or another time, we are having snow and below-freezing temperatures here in Seattle) is how hard it is to not know.  Is it going to get worse?   Should I go home now?  Should we cancel classes?  Should I drive to work?  Is it going to freeze?  Is it going to get better?  Is it going to get better and then a little melty and then be frozen and way icier and worse?  I could feel my anxiety rising both yesterday and this morning as I tried to know what was going to happen and therefore what I should do, which is, of course, impossible.  I want to figure it out, but there’s no such thing—it turns out life is not like a math problem.

At some point, I just have to make a choice and see what happens.  What seems to make that even harder is the judgment that if I stay home or go home early and the weather turns out to be not such a big problem, then I’m a wimp, but if I go bravely out into the snow and get stuck somewhere I’m an idiot.  Not only is the choice between being a wimp and an idiot a crappy choice, but it’s not real.  For one thing, it’s based on the idea that I know (or should know) what’s going to happen.  And secondly, it’s making what happens mean something—that what happens with the weather and my car, for instance, means something about me.  The great thing about saying something out loud or writing down is seeing how ridiculous it is.

So the feeling of not-knowing is uncomfortable and I want to hurry up and make a decision so that I can know rather than waiting to see how things will develop.  I might even want to make up some rule, so that every time this situation arises, I just have to follow my rule—I can skip the whole not-knowing-what-to-do thing.  Or I can just keep reminding myself that there is no “right” thing to do and that I can only make the best decision I can make with the information I have at the moment and that, generally speaking, decisions are never quite as urgent as the sensations of anxiety would have me believe.

I think I will choose vairagya for our yoga word today.  It means non-attachment.  That can refer to a lot of things, but it has always seemed to me that the ultimate non-attachment is not attaching my sense of myself, my idea of who I am, my self-worth to things outside of me, like making the right decision or the weather.  I’m okay when it’s snowing, when I stay home, when I am anxious, when I don’t know.