What a Long, Strange Trip it's Been

If I titled this One Easy Way to Make the Right Decision Every Time it would go viral.  We all want free, easy, guaranteed.  But hey, there is no such thing as "the right decision."  You go from the available data and your priorities, you try to put it through a logical process, you take the next step and throw the outcome to the winds.  Because you can never guarantee the outcome.  Okay, maybe you can think of exceptions.  But not when it comes to decisions about these soft eccentric human animals we are.

However, there are better and worse processes. 

I'm interested in this today because I just made a couple of decisions, large and small.  The smallest (maybe) was, I am not donating my Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Psychedelic-era billed hat to the church fund-raiser auction.  I put that in my mental heap a couple of weeks ago, when the auction people started asking for donations.  That hat came to my mind, and I decided to think about it.  There was no urgency to the decision, since the deadline for contributions was two months away.  I like non-urgent things.  I wish my whole life would be non-urgent.  I hate to rush around these days.  It jangles you up.

Now.  This decision had nothing to do with function. I have a tender scalp and never wear hats, and if I did, it wouldn't be a billed cap that makes you look like you have a big square head. No, it was about the heart, about keeping something that makes me smile.  Because there is a story behind this hat.  I got this hat through taking a tremendous risk.

It started out as an adventure.  We still had a Border's book store (remember the old days?), and they announced that the Ken Kesey bus, Further, was coming to their parking lot and would be full of latter-day Merry Pranksters.  Now, I have missed an awful lot of cool things in my life, and you don't get another chance to join the Peace March.  That meant I immediately wanted to go to this event.

And event it was.  There were maybe 200 of us crazy people in the parking lot on that sunny day, almost everyone younger than me, kind of bopping because they were playing music. And they were going to throw off hats!  When I heard that, I threw caution to the winds.  I was into my fifties by then and knew what it was to have a stress fracture in a foot (horrible), I knew that crowding forward screaming and reaching for a hat might mean someone would step on my foot.  I didn't care.  I wanted that hat.  And I got it!  I got it!

Now, there it is.  The unedited hat, slightly linty.  When I got it off the closet shelf to decide whether to give it to the auction or not, I knew I wouldn't take $100 for this hat unless I needed it to pay the rent.  It is a memento of having a silly adventure, of throwing caution to the winds, things I don't do often enough, if you ask me.