One of the most important events in the British education calendar is approaching: A-level results day. Beyond A-levels, choosing what you want to do, or what you want to study are two of the big decisions in life. And, as such, they are not easy ones to make. You weigh up alternative options, and find a good number of reasons behind each of them. Many in the Twittersphere are already reliving their own results day memories with one user saying: “Aaaah I remember #Alevelresults day. Led me to a glittering English Literature degree which is why I work in IT”.
Philosopher Ruth Chang – who studied law, but then switched to philosophy – has dedicated her life to the study of hard choices. She explains that when it comes to making difficult decisions, it is often not about which alternative is better, because there is no such alternative.
You might be scratching your head at this point, but just bear with me, because Chang’s philosophy is a good one. The idea is that if you are free from the illusion of a “correct” and an “incorrect” answer, you can more easily make choices in line with an outcome that is more important to you – enabling you to become the kind of person that you want to be. And it’s in this nebulous space of hard choices, that we can be the authors of our own life.
This doesn’t really make the decision any easier, but at least it makes things much more interesting. Because, it doesn’t really matter what you choose, but how you choose it. And this should be done reflectively, slowly, wholeheartedly. Definitely not as a knee-jerk reaction – not in denial, and I hope not out of panic.
Who do you want to be?
To work out which choice is right for you, you first need to decide who you want to be, and to do that, you need to know who you are – which requires careful self-observation. If you have ever tried to practise meditation or mindfulness you might have noticed how difficult it is to watch your own breath without trying to change it. But difficult as it may be, these types of exercises – which involve paying attention to the present moment on purpose and non-judgmentally – can help with (self) observation.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
_________________________________________________