The smallest decisions

The images in this piece are all from David Byrne’s Arboretum – what he describes as “mental maps of imaginary territory”.

I’m here beside you. Standing, stumbling, kneeling with you. Grieving, praying, digging through the wreckage of everything with you.

Everyone around me is on their last nerve in at least one area of life. We are companioned by a perennial liminality pervading reality, discomforting us daily.

Rage, disillusion, despair, confusion. I’ve watched too-many videos of bombs exploding in the distance of a sprawling city or town on Instagram in the last several years not wanting to look away from the horror, holding some fragile hope that witnessing would guide me toward right action. At some point, I began to notice the birds. There, in the corner of the video frame, in the wake of eruption, a flock of birds bursts into the sky and swirls in formation but they don’t fly off. They swell with the shock and then they return. There they are, over and over again in too many wars in too many places.

There is beauty here too. In my own gaze, the sun is just rising over the mountain range and I can hear the birds greeting the morning through the window. All of these feelings swirl: rage, disillusion, despair, confusion, amazement, wonder, faith, love. What does it mean to be this vulnerable together? To feel it all right up on the surface?

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I’ve tried to write here so many times in the last few weeks. I draft a thousand lines in my mind, and then drag the metaphorical eraser across them all and delete them from memory. And then I try again. Nothing feels adequate. I feel more and more self-conscious in almost all public outreach. 

Another WhatsApp group is splintering on my phone as I type this. Two sides are tugging over who is right and the rope is about to snap. Soon everyone will end up bruised and shaken. We’ll pick up a new rope, but fewer of us will come back each time another explosion erupts, and only the loudest, fiercest, most ideologically entrenched will remain. Soon there will be no more ropes. Something worse will take its place. The whole field will be abandoned. New territories will emerge as factions form in fresh WhatsApp groups, this time booming as echo chambers from the onset with homogenous voices reinforcing the same message. Instead of diversity of opinion balancing out the extremes, divisiveness will reign supreme.

This may seem trivial, but it is the smallest decisions that change everything. 

At least the tension had purpose: the group was committed to holding something together, tethered to one another through the dignity of healthy struggle, each of us bonded by carrying the weight of all that we’re grappling with by holding the thread somewhere along the spectrum. As we pushed and pulled in diplomatic debate, we challenged ourselves to peel back the layers calcifying in our own psyches to rumble with extremely complex situations. In doing so widened the edges of our perspectives and perceptions and possibilities. 

But now, another community I put my faith into is eroding bit by bit.

The center cannot hold the immensity of what it was formed to tend to in these weary times: community. Community amidst the impossible tensions gripping on us in all directions, grasping for meaning when the world is flipped upside down. All paths are disoriented and the ground we stand upon goes a thousand layers deep, rich with stories, heavy with generational decisions rippling out infinite implications. The air is thick with them too. We are surrounded on all sides bearing the burden of choice that has compounded over centuries and left so much damage in its wake. I think we could all agree: we have enough mess to clean up without making more.

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It is the smallest decisions that change everything. 

It is the smallest decisions that keep the mind supple and the heart open.

It is the smallest decisions that leave a thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand, one hundred thousand dead.

It is the smallest decisions that keep one, one hundred, two thousand, three hundred thousand trees planted. 

It is the smallest decisions that take a challenging situation and cause no harm, instead inspiring reflection and evolution. 

It is the smallest decisions that soften defenses and let more love in.

This is the question I keep coming back to: how do I let more love in?

Cynicism and nihilism are dead ends, but optimism at least forks out into fractals, reaching toward continuous transformation guided by the flickering flame of faith. The smallest decisions can change everything.

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I am revisiting two Russian literature greats as I bring my own novel’s first draft to completion – Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. In both of these novels, you might be reading along for the climactic bits of drama that govern so many stories – betrayal, murder, suicide, cruelty, romance, redemption – but the wisdom of these texts can only be found in the simplest moments of everyday life, the exquisitely articulated details of the characters’ psyches. It’s all right there in front of you, asking so much of your attention to read through the characters, beneath the words, within the sentences, and throughout the long journeys of unfolding lives. 

“One may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins—where what seem to us minute and infinitesimally small changes occur. True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another—it is lived only where these tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small changes occur.”

Leo Tolstoy

I have yet to read any writers that infuse the most profound spiritual-philosophical questions humanity confronts into the most quotidian, subtle moments of life, through barely perceptible, microscopic shifts in consciousness, for better or for worse. I briefly want to illuminate two characters in Anna Karenina: Stiva and Levin.

“Stepan [Stiva] Arkadyievich took and read a liberal newspaper….And even though neither science nor art nor politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his newspaper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they changed in him imperceptibly, of their own accord.”

Through Stiva, Tolstoy is revealing sharp commentary about ideological laziness and inauthentic intellectualism that continues to plague our planet to this day. Stiva’s actions are even more painful to bear than if he was engaged with what he was reading, but he brings no discernment, no actual thought, and definitely no confrontation with any contradictory evidence to his beliefs. He is so possessed by what he’s consuming that he’s not even in control of his own mind which is busy continuously rearranging subconsciously to believe what a “liberal” is supposed to believe.

In contrast, you have the almost obsessively internally reflective Levin. Through Levin, you learn that those who approach life with a continuous degree of inner and outer interrogation maintain the humility that’s required of living morally.  Toward the end of the book, Levin is struggling with existential questions about death and falls into despair finding no comfort in hundreds of philosophical texts he consults to settle his spirit. After all this time devouring literature, Levin enters into conversation with a peasant who cracks open the secret of life for him: that one mustn’t live for one’s belly alone, but must live for truth, for the soul, and to not forget God.

This may seem trivial, but it is the smallest decisions that change everything. 

Levin has a breakthrough. He realizes he has been living rightly, but thinking wrongly. Levin was constantly evaluating himself by reaching for some vision of grandeur to liberate humanity as the definition of a successful life, but when the peasant shows him that a life of moral integrity comes not from living for personal gain but for the soul, he has a revelation. His actions have consistently aligned with morality because he tends to, as he says, what is “incontestably necessary” – he takes care of those around him, his family, the peasants that stop him on the street, his community. His internal monologue reveals that loving his neighbor, as he was raised to do and had committed to all his life is what persists beyond all reason and logic that would encourage us to live for our bellies instead of our souls.

“Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's irrational. …

’The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.’

And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.”

This reminds me dearly of James Baldwin:

“Love has never been a popular movement and no one’s ever wanted really to be free. The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon and look around you. What you got to remember that everyone you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster. You could be that cop and you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

What I hear in Tolstoy (through Levin and Stipa) and Baldwin is a critique of both self-righteousness and passivity. Life is shaped by choice, by the smallest decisions, and staying awake to those choices is imperative for living ethically. To be in active relationship with the choicefulness of life sometimes requires agonized confrontation with wider frames of perspective, with disconfirming information, and it always requires a recognition that everything always changes. If we’re not attuned to the imperceptible shifts, our minds begin to adapt for us, shaping us into something we may not even recognize. In other words, that which is unconscious silently governs us.

I notice these trends: compromising personal lives for public personas and treating people terribly behind the scenes while projecting perfection in the spotlight; sacrificing responsible interrogation for lazy ideological complicity and clinging to intellectual entitlement where theoretical posturing overrides practice and lived experience; fixation on the awful wrongness of the world without attunement to amplifying rightness in front of us, ignoring the incontestable necessities of our present realities.

Where does goodness come from? Who’s creating it, if not us, right here?

Levin realizes there is actually no rational argument for doing “good”. For example, we can’t guarantee that the kindness we extend to others will be reciprocated, and yet, cruelty is unjustifiable. Each and every one of us can become the monster, and we must decide in ourselves not to be, not because it pays dividends, not because we want something in return, but because. Because.

Do unto others as you would have done unto you, knowing you may not get it in return. This is the moral urgency of our time, painfully diluted by the onslaught of sociopathy at scale on constant display. 

It can break you.

Don’t let it.

The smallest decision can bring more love in.

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