Weighted Decisions

 I have found that whenever I am caught with the sense of a looming decision to make, I often need to ask myself why I think the decision is so important that it would seem mentally demanding. Is it because there are major consequences to making a poor decision, or is it because I have attached meaning to the decision outcome that may or may not be true? Refraining from making a decision until all the information is available at hand is one way to practice the subtle art of seeing into these complicated meanings, and being able to identify where there is an attachment to meaning or trying to hold onto something. In these situations, I have to be a little bit like an explorer in a dense thicket: trying to pull back the intricate or delicate threads I have created around taking on a responsibility or letting go of one, to see what is actually there in the path ahead of me.
   During the group meditation tonight, we did talk about the "suffering of change", and how we often suffer simply by the fact of how we react to change. Often, there is a tremendous fear around having to adjust to new things, and it can sometimes take the form of trying to imagine oneself "shrinking" their current situation to fit something less comfortable or narrow. When I injured my foot a month ago, my first impulse was to imagine what I was able to do when I was walking normally, and then compare it to my present state. Of course, it made me feel quite despairing. But over time, my foot adjusted, and so did my mind state. It's as though the mind naturally adjusts to painful situations by changing its expectations around what is possible using the new conditions. Some psychologists call this "accommodation" but it seems to entail that we are constantly in a state of adjusting expectations to meet the situations that arise. It's only when I suddenly move from one situation to a different one that I feel like the square peg in the round hole: I haven't adjusted enough to the new situation to adopt new frames of reference. From a Buddhist point of view, one needn't necessarily wait for this to happen, because one only need be at home in the discomfort of change and to trust the mind as capable of containing change. It's only when I get used to one frame of reference that I mistakenly take that to be a permanent way of being that is being "cut" to suit the new situation.