Decisions, decisions, decisions
Last week, I made the decision to cut my trip short by about a month so that I’ll return home after about 2.5 months. It’s my first time deciding to end a trip earlier than planned and I was initially quite resistant to the idea of doing so. After all, this had been a chapter I’ve been looking forward to for the entire last year and invested so much time, planning, and money into. It felt stupid to cancel the last leg of travel after already being here and making it through the worst. As I’ve shared, it has not been an easy trip due to all the housing and health issues. I’ve also been having a really hard time sleeping at night, so I just have all this extra fatigue clouding me all the time.
However, as soon as I made the decision, I felt lighter and knew it was the right choice. I actually felt like I could enjoy my remaining time here by adding a time constraint—knowing I won’t have endless time to explore and do things later makes me more focused on doing things today. I’m also excited by the fact that I have actually built a life I love enough to be excited about going back to. I don’t need to escape my real life the way I used to because it truly is a lovely life I enjoy. And having been away from it for a month, I can appreciate all those things that had been starting to feel mundane. The best part is knowing that I will still have gotten to do all the things I was most looking forward to from this trip — the pottery residency, time with friends who live in Asia, health checks, spa and beauty treatments, and of course getting to explore this incredible city.
On the topic of making big decisions, my college roommate once told me a piece of advice that has stuck with me for a very long time and has subsequently influenced most decisions I’ve made. Anytime I would call her to contemplate what felt like an important, potentially life-changing decision, she told me not to worry too much because most decisions don’t really matter. With the exception of a few major ones like who to marry, most won’t affect the trajectory of your life in a meaningful way. I always took comfort in that advice because it meant that I couldn’t make a bad decision that would negatively affect my life forever. And looking back, it’s true in many ways. Most decisions that I spent hours fretting over ended up having little impact on my life overall.
However, the flip side of the same logic is that if nothing matters because each choice is that insignificant, it’s that in sum, these choices do have a meaningful impact. In some ways, it’s because of the fact these small decisions don’t have a one-time, outsized effect, but rather a cumulative one, we must choose to make these decisions repeatedly on a daily basis. This is true of some of the most important aspects of our lives. For example, our health is largely driven by small decisions we make multiple times, every single day — what we eat, whether or not we choose to move our bodies, where we spend our time, who we connect with, how we manage stress, and so on. While no single meal’s nutritional content is life-changing, our health is largely driven by the nutritional choices we’ve made over the past weeks, months, and years. The same goes with connections. I have a mentor that I’ve known for eight years but I realize that I never properly followed up the last few times she reached out and somehow it’s been two years since I last saw her or had a meaningful conversation with her. While not responding to a text or skipping an event didn’t feel like a big deal at the time, I can now see how doing this just a few times has led to a big gap in our relationship. I hope to reconnect with her once I’m back home.
Looking back, it seems that I’ve spent a lot of time anguishing over these “bigger” decisions that were of diminished consequence and perhaps neglected some of those daily decisions that do actually matter. In my never-ending quest to live a better life, I’m appreciating just how important these seemingly unimportant choices are. This realization is motivating me to spend more time and energy focused on these small but mighty pillars before tackling the next big thing. More important than the decision of cutting my Korea trip short or keeping it, is deciding how to spend the limited time I have here in a way that feels good both now and in the future.