Running backwards through life

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.