How to Make a Decision That Will Change Your Life

When I look back on my life, it sometimes seems that I have not decided the direction of life, but rather that I have been swept up and carried forward by exterior events. Pregnant at 19, I married and had three children, one of whom was deaf. When my husband fell in love with another woman, I stayed with him for many years. Change seemed to come about because of the people around me, because of circumstances beyond my control. Obviously, this was only partly the case.

After many years of psychoanalysis and studies in psychology, I finally decided to leave my husband and leave France. I came to America and went back to school and took up my writing career. I have since published 15 books translated into many languages and married again happily.

It is true though obviously that some of the things that happen to us occur because of circumstances we cannot change: circumstances of birth, of heredity, of class, and culture. We are born in a certain place and time; we are given certain parents, siblings, surroundings. We have certain intellectual possibilities. Small or large factors can alter our lives completely: illness, or just failing an examination because of a bad night, a chance meeting with a stranger; the intervention of a teacher or mentor on our behalf, a generous act of a colleague or on the contrary a cruel word from a friend. The introduction of a catalyst can change our lives as it can change the direction of a story.

Certainly, these last months when many of us have been partly or completely locked down by the pandemic it may have seemed that we had little agency to change our lives, to decide where we could go, or sometimes even with whom. Many of us were forced into at least partial isolation, bereft of close family or friends, and sometimes even gainful occupations.

Yet even taking these circumstances into account and increasingly as things change around us, we have a certain freedom to decide how to lead meaningful lives. These may be small or large decisions. Some face difficult decisions that these changes require: should we go back to the work we did before? Should we continue with our studies? Should we choose perhaps in mid-life a new profession or a new partner? Countless decisions, countless choices arise, small and large.

It is perhaps not wise now or ever to look for happiness that remains elusive when making these decisions but rather to choose something to enlarge the scope of our lives in any small way we can. Sometimes dreams deferred can actually now become reality. We can take up a new career.

Moments of change occur when we are able to look without, to see the larger picture, to understand if only for a moment what others have experienced and how we should react. We need perhaps to look back on these last months of suffering and isolation and learn from them something that will carry us forward and bring us joy in a wider world.

I think always of the wonderful Irish story, "The Dead" by James Joyce where Gabriel Conroy, who seems all through the story so self-absorbed, learns that after a long party at the home of his elderly aunts about his wife's first love for a young boy, Michael Furey who has died. After a moment of anger and jealousy, he is able to feel new empathy for his weeping wife and perhaps even the whole world. This is an inner change that brings about a small but important result. The last lines of this beautiful story ring in my ears with all their repetitions and remarkable rhythms bringing back to us all those we have lost and loved.

" His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Sisters

Source: Courtesy of Sheila Kohler