The Choice Beneath the Choice
How consistent decisions reshape your life
We all agonize over choices — small and big, they present themselves throughout the day. What to eat, what to wear. When to exercise and when to rest. And then there are the higher-stakes ones: Should I stay at my job? Should I look for another? Should I buy a house or rent?
I would know — because I used to agonize over choices constantly. The thought of making the wrong one would paralyze me. I feared that a single misstep might cause everything in my life to crumble.
But what if the choices aren’t what you think they are?
Imagine two different Friday nights.
In one, you’re getting ready to go out with friends. You’ve done this every Friday for years — same people, same pattern. Then, out of nowhere, an acquaintance invites you to join them for a weekend adventure. But for that, you’d need to stay home that night — to clean, shop, and pack.
Now imagine the reverse. It’s Friday, and you’re doing what you always do before a weekend trip — cleaning up, shopping, preparing. As you’re leaving work, a colleague invites you to join a spontaneous gathering at a nearby eatery.
In both cases, you can choose to go out Friday night — and on the surface, it looks like the same choice. But is it?
Making the same choice is not the same as being consistent in your choices.
Consistency means you have a clearly defined plan and you’re operating from its inner logic. If you’ve been restless and have made a plan to gain new experiences, you may choose to stay home in the first case or go out in the second. Opposite actions, same motivation: a desire for something new.
So, are you bored with your life as it is? Are you tired of the same old excitement-drama-up-feeling-down-feeling roller coaster? Do you say yes to opportunities, but without much thought or plan? You go out and do things — apparently new and exciting — yet you’re left unsatisfied and underwhelmed.
It may be time to stop reacting, and proactively decide on a course of action. Then, start making choices consistent with that vision — not based on superficial details, but on the underlying direction those choices represent.
So, what should be your directive then? I say — choose the direction of the middle. If you’ve done one thing too many times — next time, choose not to do it. Explore something else. You know — try the path “less trodden.”
Why go to the middle, you may ask? Because if you’ve indulged in one extreme, the opposite of it is not the other side, but a place somewhere in the middle. The Daoists knew this. And so did the Pythagoreans. This is why they talked about the “golden middle.”
“The opposite of one extreme is not the other extreme. It is the middle.”
— Thomas Taylor, The Theoretical Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans
Here’s a story.
A visitor goes to a guru and asks for advice. Then the next visitor comes and asks for help as well. “Guru,” asks one of his disciples, “why did you tell the first person one thing, and something entirely opposite to the second guy when both had the same situation? Which one is it?”
“I don’t know much,” the guru replied. “All I know is that one person was about to fall off the right side of their journey, so I told them to go left. The other was veering off to the left, so I told them to go right.”
You see, while the disciple was focusing on the details — treating each situation as a static picture — the guru was listening for movement. Were people drifting farther from the middle? His counsel was simple and always consistent: come back to center.
It was the direction that mattered, not the precise state.
Because it’s never about this or that situation. It’s always about what you make of it. Are you using it as a stepping stone to move toward the middle? Or are you blundering about, missing the signs of impending disaster — oscillating between right and left, always on the verge of falling off?
Change your mind about how you view the choices in front of you, and your life changes. You won’t be as easily overwhelmed, cornered, or confused. Because now the question becomes simple: Is this choice moving me farther into the extreme of what I’ve been doing all along, or is it guiding me toward center?
Why bother with the center?
It’s simple — there, you’ll find freedom. Not the kind of freedom the world glorifies — the misguided freedom to indulge your worst impulses, fumble around mindlessly, or do whatever you please at the expense of others — but true freedom. The kind that comes from understanding life’s patterns and knowing how your choices shape consequences. You begin to act with awareness, not impulse. You become a conscious creator of your experience. And you finally taste what real freedom is.
You stop following advice meant for someone else. Instead, you build your own internal GPS. And while it might not be perfect at the beginning, it’s perfectly tailored to you. It’s solid, reliable, and comes with a built-in correction mechanism. It has whistles and bells to alert you when you’re about to fall off the cliff. And when you course-correct, life never has to spiral into an overly dramatic tragedy. In that state, there are no sins — just minor errors that you correct quickly and with much less suffering or pain.
In the middle, you also discover joy. Life is no longer dreary, tedious, or heavy, but a game to play. Now you lose a point, now you gain a point — but overall, your ranking improves, and you enjoy yourself.
There, you also find more energy, more enthusiasm, more creative spark. You begin to take yourself less seriously. You walk through life with more confidence. Because that’s where all of that lives — in the center.
On the extremes, there’s only fatigue, fear, anxiety, drama, highs, and lows. And when you finally tire of swinging back and forth, remember: it’s time to reconsider how you make your choices.
Next time you’re faced with a decision, pause and observe the direction. In which direction is the middle? Don’t worry too much about the static details of the situation. Ask instead: Which of these choices will bring me closer to the middle?
Chances are, it’s the one that’s less loud and less familiar — the path that takes you outside your comfort zone, yet remains oddly alluring. Why not? — you ask yourself. And as you begin to contemplate it, you find more and more benefits to that choice, and fewer and fewer reservations. The right choice always appears more and more right with sincere contemplation. Only the wrong choices keep demanding new and different justifications and forms of validation.
Try it.
I did once. And though it felt downright scary, I never went back to my old way of making decisions. It turned out that great.
So what did I do, you may ask? Well, so many things that it’s hard to remember them all. My friend said I should create a social media account and start posting my writings there. Ouch. As a Gen-X person, social media scares me. But that was the direction “less trodden” — and I had to try it. So here I am — on FB, YouTube, and Medium. I haven’t tried X (Twitter) yet, but I even have a podcast. All in the name of the “golden middle.” :-)
Then the same friend said — you should try “guided writing.” I had no idea what that meant and resisted it for the longest time. But again, I knew the path to the middle led that way, so I started writing. And for those of you who have read the story about my writing, you know how uncomfortable and long-winded that path is. But here I am — with two books, which I self-published not to become a New York Times bestselling author, but so that I could put my voice out there.
For, you see, I had held my voice and kept it to myself for so long that it was starting to mess with my mental well-being. I was angry, restless, bitter, and resentful. With the books out, I am happy and content. I no longer feel the urge to go and criticize other creators.
And then a day came when I realized I had overstayed my time at my current job. After twenty years, you can only imagine the level of comfort that job presented. But it had also gradually undermined my confidence, my sense of adventure, and filled me with negativity and victimhood. I had to break that. And once again, the path lay through the middle. If I had been in one place for twenty years, then the middle pointed in a direction away from that place.
But here is a wonderful surprise for you: when you choose the direction toward the middle, life starts helping — not hindering — you. Happy synchronicities, helpful mentors, and all kinds of wonderful happenstances begin to materialize around you. And you realize that the old ways were taking too much effort — not the new ones. Only, you had boiled yourself gradually like the proverbial frog, and you didn’t even know how bad it was until you made that choice for the new. The corrective direction toward the middle.
And before you go and jump off the deep end — I’d counsel you to try it first in small, low-stakes steps. Grab a cup of coffee with a colleague you wouldn’t normally talk to. Say no to a family member when you’ve always said yes. Join the local hiking or meditation group. Don’t yell at your boss or quit your job just yet. After all, it took several years, a lot of small course corrections, and validation before I gained the confidence to leave my old job.
This is the scientific way — the way of small trials and errors, of evaluating the results at every step, and making steady corrections.
Always toward the middle.
“Do what you want, but ask yourself, ‘Do such things chain me to or free me from the world?’ It is not what it is, but the underlying trend — the first derivative of your path to freedom.”
— Tatiana Gwon, Meditations, 9.1
References
Gwon, Tatiana. Effortless Reality. https://www.effortlessreality.com/books/.
Gwon, Tatiana. “Rediscovering the Wheel.” The Writing Cooperative. Medium. https://medium.com/writing-cooperative/rediscovering-the-wheel-4498b11e4192.
Taylor, Thomas. The Theoretical Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans.
