Discombobulated. A word whose meaning and mouth-feel are so well-matched. And a dear cousin to one of my all-time favorite words: Bijigetty.

So… This week I moved into my very own place. I even signed a lease. A twelve-month lease. Eeep!

After a little review of my former living situations, I was shocked to discover that I’ve never lived alone. I actually had to double-check my memory. And if you know me, you’re probably surprised, too. I just seem like someone who would. Plenty independent and all that.

But nope. I’ve lived with friends, I’ve lived with a boyfriend, I’ve never lived by myself.

And taking this step is a Very Good Thing. But the decision-making was terribly uncomfortable. The act of committing unsettled me. I guess settling in is sometimes incredibly unsettling.

I’ve been learning about personal sovereignty, the quality of owning your space, from some wise women. Playing with techniques for establishing boundaries, separating my stuff from other people’s stuff, and taking responsibility for the shape of my life.

And now I guess I’m wondering about the opposite. What about when the last thing I want is to be the master of my own domain?

Because in this particular lease-signing frenzy, I found myself casting around for someone else to tell me what to do. I found a place, the place. And then I desperately needed someone else (my mom? a friend? the landlord? God?) to tell me whether I should take it.

There’s more at play than just sovereignty. I can try to choose the next right thing. I can play the heat-seeking missile game. But I’m wondering how to step up to the plate and run my own show when part of me wants to be taken care of by someone else. (Or drown my sorrows in metaphor.)

One trick is to ask myself, what would Someone Wise do? Can I call on my internal council of representatives? If I try to guess what Martha Beck or Pema Chodron would advise in this situation, isn’t my interpretation of their advice an indirect way of accessing my own internal wisdom?

Or I might ask a future me. Me-ten-years-from-now, what do you think? But she usually just smiles beatifically, generously, and shrugs as if to say: All will be well. And: Sweetie, life turns out just right either way. This is comforting, yes. And reassuring, absolutely. And not one bit helpful.

You know how when a toddler falls or bumps her noggin, the first thing she does, before her eyes even have a chance to fill with tears, is to look up at you? To gauge your reaction? And if you soothe her saying “you’re okay, you’re okay,” she’ll usually shake off the experience and go back to her play.

I guess I’m wanting to learn how to be that “you’re okay, you’re okay” person for myself.

Do you finding yourself casting about for advice about big decisions? How do you trust yourself?

Right now I’m shifting a bunch of things related to my work, which basically means I’m back to hot pursuit of The Thing. Even more than usual. And the ideas I’m heading toward started bringing up all of these memories of (weird) things I liked doing as a kid. (Another dose of nostalgia.)

It’s reminding me of so much of the career advice, from Jung to Barbara Sher, for when you’re stuck in that I-have-no-freaking-clue-what-to-do place: Explore what you loved doing in childhood.

That childhood review never helped me. I was trying to be way too Sesame Street with my imaginings. I kept searching for memories that looked like a nine year-old version of me spinning around in a field of wildflowers and butterflies. (Idealistic, much?)

The things I spent time doing were simple, and they were so Me that they didn’t stand out in my memory at all. (Reminds me of some guidance I love from Gretchen Rubin: When you’re trying to figure out what to do, try focusing less on what you love to do and more on what you do do.)

Infuriating Funny, but I’ve only been able to recall things I enjoyed as a kid after the epiphanies about new directions, after taking tiny steps toward things I maybe possibly wanted to try.

Oh sure, in hindsight, my childhood experiences make perfect sense. Weird stuff, like:

In fourth grade, my best friend and I decided that what our class really needed was a trivia contest. (Nerd Alert.) So we created… SuperQuiz! And somehow convinced our teachers to let us organize this bizarre intellectual battle for nine year-olds. With trophies and everything!

(Most incredibly embarrassing question: What weighs more: A pound of sand, or a pound of water?)

Then we convinced our teachers that we desperately needed a talent show. Organized that, too.

Next, we created a summer camp for kids in our neighborhood. And convinced parents to pay us for subjecting their children to an off-key rendition of “Do your ears hang low?” OMG, I know.

So I was either fantastic at event planning, or freakishly persuasive in my youth. (And also, really precocious. Shudder.) And I loved setting the mood and scene for an experience. I still do.

But none of these memories evoke an obvious career. Instead they offer teeny tiny clues about what I like to do and who I like to be.

And there are times when all you can do is act as if an idea is the next right thing, and take a little step. It helps me to remember that there really isn’t just one thing. And that no matter what I do, I’m still me. (Well, sometimes that helps. Sometimes it’s totally exasperating.)

It’s looking like I’ll always be discovering my thing, and allowing it to keep doing its metamorphosis thing. Which is one of the reasons I’m super excited about Victoria Brouhard’s Shmorian Thing-Finding class next week. The evolution continues…

Curious… Did combing through childhood memories ever help you find clues about your thing?

Do you ever notice how some decisions come so easily and obviously, while others involve hair-pulling, cookie-scarfing fretting and waffling? Ugh, waffling.

Lately I have this sense that life is flowing along a strong, natural current. And I’m the one that manages to keep jacking up the pace. Throwing up boulders and objections, creating rapids and eddies. And scariness. And then getting frustrated when the current takes my hint and slows down.

Of course damming up the current is about fear. And maybe (probably) I’m trying to perfectly orchestrate all of the teeny tiny elements before taking a single step. If I could only manipulate all of the details just so, then everything will unfold cleanly, smoothly.

Without any messes. Without risking failure.

And so I don’t even notice how efficiently the current handles itself. I decide I want something to happen, and then these little gifts of grace start showing up. Or maybe it’s the other way around: I hope for a change, and so I start noticing openings and possibilities sprouting up through the cracks.

And everything is moving along beautifully. Or could be if I didn’t keep pulling the emergency brake.

I know it’s not that simple or easy to ride the waves. I’m not fearless. To flow with the current I have to le go of this little scrap of shore. Which can make me nostalgic and wistful. Oh, and also terrified.

Being scared is allowed. Taking my time is okay. Except sometimes I do it unconsciously, like bumping the pause button and wondering why the movie stopped playing. (And maybe throwing a tantrum about it.)

It feels a little like I climbed into my seat on the roller coaster, and it’s ready to start off down the tracks. Just as soon as I buckle my harness. Or the boat is ready to pull out into open water. Only there’s one line still tied to the dock and I’m struggling with the knot. If I can even find the knot.

Next step? Oh, you know, just me allowing things to get crackin’ already.

But sometimes, when I’m frustrated or impatient, it’s wonderfully reassuring to realize that the world is spinning around, just waiting patiently for me to catch up. That it’s more about letting things flow than forcing anything to happen. When I remember, that is.

How do you stay in the flow? Or recognize the moments when you’re the one slowing the evolution?

I recently came dreadfully close to making a Very Bad Decision. There were a couple of weeks of ruminating and whining and imploring about What should I dooooooooo. Where should I doooo it?

All culminating in my spending an entire day in my pajamas eating chocolate and peanut butter. And also pretzels and ice cream. And a slew of other crap. Phew! Crisis averted. Just in the nick of time.

Of course gorging on sugar is kind of a crisis of its own magnitude, but I’ll tolerate that marathon eating spasm in order to gain a little perspective. I’m okay dealing with some minor nausea and frustration if it will keep me from backing my soul into a corner. That trade is plenty fair in my book.

I thought I was confused about this particular decision, but apparently my essential self was effervescently clear. And one of her favorite strategies for making a point is to highjack my attention by embarking on monumental lust for gooey desserts. Clever, that one.

(However, in order to keep me on my toes, she’s equally committed to manic preoccupation with obsessive attempts at achieving The Perfect Body. You know, to balance things out.)

After centuries of struggle, I’m intimate enough with these delightful quirks to know that whatever thing has her all wound up with cookies and compulsion has about zero to do with body stuff.

I used to be all Why?Why?Why? can’t I just eat like a normal person who is effortlessly slender???

Not a useful question. It just kept me from noticing that insistent tap on my shoulder and buzz in my ear. The one saying Ah ah ah, you are heading in the most incredibly wrong direction, Dearie.

Now it might take experiencing the rare junk food frenzy. But if I get very attentive and willing to go deeper than bittersweet chocolate (um, hypothetically speaking), and if I get curious about those impulses instead of critical, my essential self is happy to feed me clues about the state of my spirit.

And she ends up being right an infuriating percentage of the time.

Does your essential self have a favorite way to make you crazy command your attention?

I had a pretty crazy dream a few nights ago. I know, hearing about other people’s dreams can cause you to nod off, so I won’t go into the nitty-gritty details. To sum up: the setting was a path through a dark forest (yes, I am a dreamtime cliche) and the wind was whipping around and I was afraid of some unseen force so I tried to run through the forest to escape. But, as typical of my running dreams, it felt like slogging through heavy bread dough and I wasn’t making any progress.

So for some reason I turned around and tried running backwards. And it worked. It felt uncertain, and a little out of control, but I was running much faster and freer.

The sensation reminds me of an episode of Friends. (Apparently I spent every Thursday night throughout high school and college parked in front of Must-See TV.) This is the one where Rachel and Phoebe decide to go running together, and Phoebe runs all crazy with her arms and head flailing around. Rachel is so embarrassed that she starts inventing reasons to avoid running together. The last clip of the episode shows Rachel tearing through Central Park Phoebe-style having grown tired of her own “appropriate” style of running.

Some background: I’ve been trying to make some business decisions. But instead of deciding anything, I just keep spinning myself in circles because I’m obsessing about making the right decision. I taught a teleclass last weekend, and one of the wise women on the call made a comment about indecision being the place where all of our struggling and suffering happens. So true for me.

As I walked with my dog the morning after my dream, I wondered about its meaning. If there is a message, and if I were willing to hear it, I think it would be that it doesn’t really matter which decision I make. Weird, right? I have a sense that in this particular circumstance, any decision at all equates to moving forward and I only need to focus on the next right thing.

For me, being indecisive is like running forward through bread dough. It seems reasonable and logical to want to make the most practical decision. But instead it’s keeping me stuck. Choosing something, anything, is more like running backwards. It will be uncertain and it might feel a little out of control, but it will be progress. I came across this Samuel Butler quote this week, and it perfectly describes how I feel:

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Whereas sometimes I think I need to already rock the metaphorical violin in order to even practice alone behind closed doors. This is specific to me and my patterns. Your pattern might be to run willy-nilly through everything, making rash decisions and wrecking all sorts of havoc along the way. Oh wait, sometimes I do that, too. Anyway, the point is to notice what your usual pattern is, and to notice whether you’re repeating it in a way that will lead you toward a result similar to the one you’re trying to change.

Indecision itself is one whopping pattern, and deserves plenty more attention than I’ve given it here. But I’m curious whether you’ve ever been in a spot where you realized any decision at all was better than treading in the quicksand of figuring out the “right” choice. How’d it turn out?

*And by the way, the superfabulous Eileen of Soul Sleuthing has been writing a dream analysis series, and I love the Jungian-inspired method she uses.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a workshop with Pam Slim as part of her “Escape From Cubicle Nation” book tour. I was lucky enough to escape my cubicle several months ago, but fortunately Pam is also an expert in how to move forward as an entrepreneur once you’re free of the cubicle (and its better half, the steady paycheck).

One idea she mentioned really struck me – when you’re having a hard time making a decision, try to think of yourself as a heat seeking missile. Play that childish game with yourself – am I getting warmer?

I sometimes try to make decisions by choosing the perfect thing out of Infinity’s top hat.  Like, gosh, I could go anywhere or do anything, how will I ever choose?  

It feels so much simpler to offer up two extremes and choose between, and then continue to narrow down my options that way.  This method might seem obvious to other people, but for whatever reason it doesn’t come naturally for me.  

Maybe to do with the little perfectionist thing I have going on.  I want to make the right decision, and I want that right decision to be perfect.  Like, forever.  

Hmmm.  I am realizing there are two ways to look at that.  First, things change all of the time.  I change, the people I love change, the world, the economic environment, all of it changes all of the time.  

It’s that whole concept of this too shall pass.  Ebb and flow.  Yadda, yadda.  This is true for good and bad, joy and pain.  And if everything is always changing in every moment, I can’t possibly make a decision now that will be right forever. *Insert tears here*

On the other hand, any decision I make now is right forever.  As long as I’m open to the flow of change.  

I guess it would help to tell you what decision I’m trying to make.  I’ve been trying to decide where to move.  Actually, that’s not true.  I have decided where to move.  I feel pretty sure that LA is the place.  

Pretty sure.  Except.  Well.  It’s just that there are all of these questions and fears (and lions and tigers and bears) that pop up and get me to second guess myself and think maybe it’s not the perfect decision.  

After all, even with everything I love about Southern California (read: weather, lovely friends, climate, culture, sunshine, opportunities, blue sky) there are things I don’t love (plastic materialism) that warn me it won’t be perfect.  So maybe it’s not the absolutely-on-all-accounts-100% right decision forever.

But the pressure to make the forever decision is what’s really screwing me up.  Because if I decide from the perspective that any decision right for now is right forever, I can see that moving to LA may be part of an overall flow. After all, it feels decidedly warmish on the hot/cold continuum.  

(And delightfully warmish on the climate continuum.)

If I let go of the pressure that comes with wanting to make a permanently ideal decision, I can allow that maybe ultimately Portland is the right place, maybe Italy, maybe Manhattan.  But it’s possible that ending up in one of those place has to come by way of LA.  And so LA can be the right decision forever by way of being the right decision for now.

Does anyone else use the hot or cold barometer?  Or is there a different method to decision making that works well for you?  I would love to hear your ideas.