A friend told me recently that if she finds herself unable to decide what to do, she tosses a coin and uses it to test how she feels. She didn’t say what she does when she doesn’t want to choose. What do you do?
Secret Vespers
by Patrick Edwards-Daugherty
This is probably pretty common, but if the coin picks something I’m happy with, I go with that. If I’m incredibly disappointed by the coin’s decision, I usually do the opposite. Making decisions can be excruciating, so finding a way to artificially put it in “fate’s hands” can be helpful.I like to live by the procrastinator’s philosophy: “Don’t just do something, sit there!” Unless the decision is urgent, usually an answer will present itself in time.
Agreed. The purpose of the coin flip isn’t to make your decision for you, but to make the decision you don’t know you’ve made more apparent to you.
–Ember–
Coin tossing is how I passed Physics Senior year. Narrow my choices down and then assign one letter to heads and one to tails. Flip it, circle it, and run with it.
I love this! :) There’s so much I’ve written about decisions made when flipping a coin…. hmmmm
Thanks for commenting! I hope your coin toss decisions led to the good kind of adventures.
I think too much, and know myself too well, for this to help. Before the coin leaves my hand, I have already pondered what I will do if it is heads, or if it is tails.
Usually I fall back on irrational impulsiveness.
I frequently use the coin toss as a clarifier. I don’t always, or even often, go with the toss, but having the decision made for me triggers either relief or a gut-level rebellion against it, and *that’s * what I go with.
The coin indicates that I should post a comment here now.
Typically if I have a hard decision to make I’ll put it off until it must be made, then do whatever feels right at the time. Overall I find it frustrating when I can’t decide what to do.
Thank you for the comment! I think there might be a typo in the email address you entered the first comment you made. It seems this way because a “mail not delivered” message came back when I commented on one of your comments. I changed your email address on the post to my best guess, and I hope it is a correct guess.
Good guess, I’m glad you figured that one out. I didn’t realize I’d filled in in wrong the first time, and since it was automatically filled when I went to post another comment didn’t bother to check if it was right or now.
I actually went out and bought blank-faced dice and passed them out to people I work for, to emphasize how sometimes their decision-making process was ultimately useless.
Where I work now, I passed out dice with different emoticons on each face.
I’ve been accused of being indecisive, but most of the time it’s more just liking all the options.