I walked out with quite a few ceramic pieces. BECAUSE LOOK AT THAT BOWL.
Luis wants to keep fruit in there. Ugh. I want to make bread in it. Sigh…
And the soup… I swear the soup got better too. Same soup. Same event. But I could actually taste it once I stopped running the machine.
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I make a lot decisions for a living.
All day. The best available choice with the least available information. And I’m good at it. I’ve built a reputation on it. People look to me for it.
And it bleeds into everything. The restaurant, the art benefit, the grocery store. The decider doesn’t take days off. It just keeps running, sorting the world into categories, rendering verdicts, establishing positions.
It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to name because it feels like me. It feels like personality. But it’s a role. A function. A thing I do, not a thing I am.
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Luis and I went to Urban Hill for my early birthday. I wrote about it last week: the Polaroid, the framed photo, the sparkler I didn’t expect.
What I didn’t realize? I didn’t decide anything. The cake. The camera. The moment worth marking. Someone else had already built the infrastructure before I walked in.
All I had to do was receive it.
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Two moments. Same discovery.
At Art and Soup, I set the mantle down myself. Caught the machine running, and chose to let it go. And suddenly I could see the face in the keys. The beauty in the bowls. The actual taste of the soup.
At Urban Hill, someone else had already made the decisions for me. The infrastructure was built. The decider wasn’t needed. I just walked into a space where receiving was the only job.
Either way, the relief was the same.
And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: nothing collapsed.
My job didn’t crumble while I was eating soup. Decisions didn’t pile up and crush me because I took an afternoon off from making them. The mantle waited. Oh, it was certainly patient. It was still there when I got back. 🙂
We act like the decider has to run constantly, or something will fall apart. Like the muscle will atrophy if we rest it.
But I looked at art without assessing it, and I still know how to assess things. I received a birthday without planning it, and I still know how to plan. The capacity doesn’t disappear because you set it down.
The mantle is more patient than we give it credit for.
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The Polaroid is on a shelf in my house now. A ceramic bowl from Art and Soup sits on my kitchen counter.
Evidence that I was there. That I was happy. That I let the machine stop running long enough to actually see what was in front of me.
Here. This is what you looked like when you weren’t deciding anything.
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The Department of Aliveness offers you a Permit:
Set it down for an hour.
The mantle will wait. The decisions will be there. Your competence won’t evaporate because you stopped performing it for a lunch, an afternoon, a single art benefit where you let yourself just look at things without rendering a verdict.
You can pick it back up whenever you’re ready. It’s not going anywhere.
And you might find (I did) that the soup tastes better. The art reveals itself. The birthday lands differently.
Not because you earned the relief. But because you let yourself have it.
-Alex 🧡
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If you know someone who hasn’t stopped deciding in a while, please pass this along.
