The sliding door effect
The sliding door effect …
Every day we take thousands decisions, some of them are minor like what to drink tea or coffee? Others are more relevant and involve our interactions with other human being. For every decision our brain is presenting us millions, billions of relevant facts store I our memory, some times the facts have a consolidated history some other times they don’t.
I know I like coffee more than tea, this is also confirmed by the number of them I had enjoy in the past, a number that is significantly higher than the teas I had. But I know as well that I prefer a good tea to a mediocre coffee.
As such when I choose what to drink, my brain presents me all the information regarding my taste, my past experiences, my geographic location (am I in a place where the coffee is god or not), finally it analyzes the information related to that specific moment. Is the guy at the coffee machine doing good or he looks not really on the subject?
As said, billions on information to recover, analyze and present in seconds or less than that. For a coffee!!!
Guess what, in our day we have to take decisions that are much more complex than that, and unless you are totally nuts, you do not use a coin to decide what to do.
To make things even worse, the more you grow, the more your data bank expand, the more your brain has material to choose coffee or tea.
In some case that will make the decision faster, in other it will make it much, much longer.
On top of that there are millions of decisions that, let say it, do not count.
Nothing will change in your life if you choose the tea instead of coffee, unless … Well unless that is one of the “sliding door” moment.
What is a “sliding door” moment? If you have seen the movie with Gwyneth Paltrow in 1998, you already know, if not I will explain in a second.
There are few moments in our life where a series of possible events converge, they normally converge in very simple day by day action, but the context is not the usual.
Something sounds strange, something is different. Most of the time when this happens we do not realize it right away, we do after.
Those are the moment where we say to ourselves, “What if?”.
What if instead decide to prune a small branch of that tree I had decided to … don’t do it.
Well I would not injury my neck with the risk to remain paraplegic for the rest of my life, and I would not marry my first wife, and … So on and on and on.
In short, my life would had been totally different, ONLY IF.
Why I am saying all this? Because recently I had found myself in front of three of the most difficult questions I had to answer. That in combination with a series of events that bring me to raise my old antennas, and perceive, more then see that I was going to hit one “sliding door” moment.
The questions in discussion are something that in one or another moment in our life we had already face.
Well at least I did.
But all together in this specific moment of my life, they had a totally different impact and meaning.
The questions are:
- Do you know who you are?
- Do you understand what has happened to you?
- Do you want to live this way?
What was interesting for me was and still is, that those questions, raise in the exact moment in which I was in front of my “sliding door” moment. In that exact moment I realized that my brain, who was filling me with information and driving me to take one decision or another, simply stops. It stops to push, stop to provide suggestions, it focus on NOT to give an answer. It focuses on NOT making that moment, a “sliding door” one.
I could stay days, or seconds now analyzing the data and try to make a better decision. That moment is gone, and this is good.
It is good because I can now first answer to more important and relevant questions.
Who am I (now, after X years)?
How it can be that I am here, what really happened to ME ( I mean the “ME”)
Is this the life I had choose to live, or I had left it to bring me in a different place?
Not the first time I raise these questions to myself, but I have to say, this time is different. As mentioned before, we often raise one of them to our attention, and we provide an answer. Evaluate what to do and so on.
It also may happen that we ask all three of them, in a moment that is a moment, but not a “sliding door” moment.
I had hit that special situation, and my “sliding door” moment become, not to choose A or B, but between ignore the questions or take them, accept that they will, once more, oblige me to change the direction of my life.
I know what to do, and in many ways I am scare, because in order to DO IT, I have to go to the longer road, I need to have a lot of courage, and once more be ready for the difficult moments that for sure will come.
But this is life.
The only thing I can say, is life is courage, and there is more courage in being honest when answering the above questions, than in performing any scaring or extreme activity.
I am writing all this, to share, share an important moment, and take the opportunity to raise to all of you my friends three simple questions:
- Do you know who you are?
- Do you understand what has happened to you?
- Do you want to live this way?
First of all I should have wrote this in Italian, because English it is not my mother tongue and as such I will not be as clear as I would like, and probably I will not be able to use all the terms I am in desire to.