Staring 'into the eyes of the Great Magician' Well hello 2010! A new year, a new blog. Where to start? As I mean to go on I suppose... with an unedited, unstructured, perhaps unintelligible stream of consciousness, because the primary purpose of...
Ignorance = Blogging Bliss? I often think that if I had better knowledge of psychology, sociology, history etc. I'd have been better qualified to address the issues I've raised in the Rabbit so far. But yesterday, after writing my...
Hit Pause on 'Perfection' A music-specific continuation from Jan 26 ('The Problems of an Ideal Rabbit'): For me and many others, one of the main and eternal aspirations of a musician is to break down the physical and mental...
The Joy of Laundry Yesterday I sat in a laundromat for a good chunk of the afternoon. Understandably, I expected it to be a fairly brain-numbing and/or depressing experience. I was pleasantly surprised, however, when I started...
The Silent Musician This afternoon I sat in an orchestra rehearsal in my normal place but, because of injury, without my cello. Even though the rehearsal did, of course, have my undivided attention, I started thinking about...
How do we know when we’ve let enough time pass that we’ve come to the right decision? Is there even such a thing as a right decision? Do we believe in fate in order to give us the confidence to commit to a decision?
Whatever your opinion, don’t be so sure. You’ll probably think the opposite tomorrow. I know I will. Or at least I think I will.
It’s because we’re P (Perceiving). Because we have a strong perception of all the possibilities around us, we recognize quickly that we cannot control the flow of events, that unexpected things may come up, and that we cannot predict the future with reasonable certainty. As a result, we prefer to keep our options open. We are comfortable with flexibility, not resolution. We do not want to commit to a decision, because making it permanent takes away our flexibility–our ability to react to the unexpected. Taking that away stresses us out. That’s when we worry about what might happen, because we won’t be able to take it in stride. As long as things are left open, it doesn’t matter, because we can take things as they come, and that’s how we function best.
This is in contrast to J’s who need resolution. They prefer to know exactly what to expect, so they want to come to a permanent decision quickly. But their problem is that they have a harder time coping when things don’t turn out the way they expected. We are better at reacting with flexibility in that situation, but it comes at the price of often being indecisive.
But to answer the question you raised more directly: The way I see it, we won’t know whether a decision was a good (or “right”) one until we can observe the consequences. While a J might think, “If I do A and B, then C will happen”, a P would think “If I do A and B, then C is likely to happen, in theory, but there’s also D and E and F and G and…” lol. Things are less cut and dry, because of all the possibilities. After the fact, then we know whether it was good or not. Beforehand, we know we cannot be certain, which makes it difficult to commit to something. If we see things not turning out as expected, we want to be able to change the decision accordingly.