the suddenness of decisiveness...

Tomorrow I'll head to Worcester, MA to meet my grand daughter Sylvie for the first time. In the shop today I've finished assembling blocks of inlay, so I can inlay box lids when I return.

Have you ever wondered how decisions are made, and how necessary change begins to take place? I've been watching the news and the complete chaos in the House of Representatives. I called my congressman this morning to express my concerns that our representatives need to awaken to the necessity of  working together, for the benefit of all. 

Philosopher William James shared some wisdom on the subject in his 1890 book, Principles of Psychology, as follows: 

"We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” etc.; but still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances?

"If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of rising in the condition of wish and not of will. The moment these inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects."

There can be a suddenness to decisiveness, just as James describes. That gives me hope... In the meantime, call your Republican representative if you have one, and offer the nagging sound of alarm. Pass the budget, you must demand, one that the Senate can also approve, and support Ukraine in its never ending hour of need.

Make, fix and create...