Choices are the hinges of Destiny—Pythagoras

Greetings Dear Ones,

Maple Syrup and Wedding seasons seem to be overlapping a little earlier than usual this year. Already, the shop is clogged with enormous snowy drifts of tulle, silk, and organza. Some of the weddings are not until summer but I’ve had a string of refreshingly Big D brides lately who just want things “Done” and out of the way early.

“Big D,” says Prudence, “are we talking bust size here?”

“No,” I hasten to correct her. “D is for get-‘er-Done!”

Let’s face it—some people are just “High D.” These brides are Dominant, Decisive and Direct. They know exactly what kind of sleeves they want added to a sleeveless gown with breathtaking immediacy and clarity. They thrive on vanquishing challenges. No extra Floof for them! They prefer Action over long-winded discussions of details, frilly-dilly-dallying or excessive deliberation. They embody the old Nike ad: “Just Do It.” I’ve started asking brides how many dresses they tried on before they found “the one.” Three this week said they bought the first one they tried on. “I had an idea in my head, and there it was,” said one. “No need to look further!” Their consultations are over in twenty minutes or less.

These young women delight and fascinate me. Prudence, my inner critic, wishes with all her heart that this could be me. (Er… decisive, that is, not a bride!) In fact, I am the furthest thing from it. Had I been born into a tribe whose naming rituals reflect the characteristics of its members, my middle name would have been “Shall-I-Shan’t-I,” instead of Ann, for my mother.

Some folks make decisions easily; some struggle to make them at all, which leads to decision fatigue. According to something online called The Decision Lab, “Decision fatigue is a cognitive shortcut that causes irrational trade-offs in decision-making. It emerges when mental resources are depleted after making numerous decisions, leading individuals to favor immediate gratification, oversimplify complex decisions, or default to familiar, less optimal options.”

A mother of someone getting married, who is closer to my age than these brides, brings in a series of dresses. She cannot decide. She has ordered one from a website, found another on a shopping spree to a big city and thrifted a third. Now she seeks advice from me. Her level of cognitive impairment resulting from decision fatigue has led to irrational optimism about what a woman clothed in jeans, muck boots, and winter-weary woolens can tell her about “fashion.” Her brain has taken an illogical short-cut that makes her think that because I am surrounded by beauty that I must understand it. I should know what would make her feel and look beautiful. I don’t have those sorts of magic wands. I can make things fit people; I cannot make them be Right for people.

Another mother of a betrothed person comes in with a few choices. She needs help deciding whether she should wear the frumpy frock and look like the groom’s elderly grandmother, or the bling-y sleeveless number that makes her look like the bride’s hot aunt—far too young to be her actual mother. Does this woman want to be Magnificent? Or (small d) drab? She cannot decide. I want to hug her. To me, there is no question, but then I always have enough decision juice in my little vial for other people’s choices. I button my lip. She must decide for herself who she needs to be on that day. “All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare, and never more so than at a wedding. Does this woman want to show up as Best Supporting Actress in this drama, or the one assumed most likely to mop the floor after the lights go down?

Marianne Williamson is quoted as saying, “Every decision you make reflects your evaluation of who you are” which makes me arch an eyebrow at the brides who say, “I’ve never been a rhinestone kinda gal—but hey!” as they stand there in a gown that resembles a disco ball from the eighties.

Decision-making is easy for those whose values are clear. I notice that most young people are better at it than most older people. Why is this? Are our values muddy? I actually think the opposite is true. Is it because we had fewer choices when we were their age and our choose-it muscles are flabby as a result? (Remember being told in middle school “you get what you get and you don’t get upset”?) Or is it because our Decision Juice is tanking with our estrogen levels? Is some little stinker of a neurotransmitter up there in our prefrontal cortex refilling the vials with substitute I-just-don’t-give-a-crap elixir?

Decisions exhaust us.

Decision fatigue is no joke. Studies show that the average person makes over 35,000 decisions daily, which drains our mental capacity and leaves some of us like dribbling idiots by nightfall. The quality of our choices declines as we make additional decisions, literally wearing out our cognitive abilities. When we have either too many choices to make or too many options to choose from, we become overwhelmed. Analysis leads to paralysis. This is probably why I get home at the end of a long day and decide, rather than backing the truck downhill in the dark, it’s a better idea to unload two hundred pounds of chicken feed onto a sled and ride it through the snow to the barn. I remember a pod-cast host saying something to the effect that “there are no such things as bad decisions” because we either make the Right decision or we make a decision we can learn from. The worst thing is actually to make no decision at all.

“With regard to the chicken feed on a sled,” says Prudence, “you make this decision at least once every winter and you never learn! Why do you persist in doing something that has generated the exact same consequences every year?? Neither memories nor bruises instruct you. You’re just lucky you hit the chicken coop instead of sailing over the cliff on the other side into the manure pile below where no one will find you until mud season.”

Perhaps it is because I always make this particular decision too late in the day. Experts advise us to save all our important decisions for the early part of the day. I’m out of the Good Decision juice by 8:am some mornings and left to straggle through the day with the sludge left at the bottom of the glass. By the time I get home and do my chores, I have no idea what to eat for dinner. I cannot decide.

“Yesterday you decided to eat three cups of blueberry chia seed pudding that had sprouted mold,” says Prudence, “and that decision wasn’t just bad for you—it affected the entire septic system.”

I blame my bum: I wasted at least four decisions on it before dawn’s first light, trying to decide which pair of jeans made it look smaller and cuter. (It turns out, None.) There is nothing that drains one of decision juice so fast as a whole lot of “nothing to wear” in the closet.

“Well, I guess Justice was done. Who paid in the end? Your bum,” says Prudence with prim satisfaction.

“I need to decide what to wear the night before, but according to the experts, I don’t make my best choices at night. So now what? What if I choose something outrageous? What if I pair Navy blue with Black?”

“Perhaps you should go back to wearing a uniform,” says Prudence. She is envisioning school-girl plaids, knee socks, and a crisp white blouse.

“I Do,” I retort huffily, “It’s called that pile on the chair of all the warm things I wore yesterday that are still clean enough.”

There are so many wrinkles in the irony here. For instance, the cheer-you-up kind of coaches say “Don’t mourn your bad decisions. Just overcome them in time with better ones.” Ha! Yes! Doesn’t making more decisions lead us to making poorer ones? And also, how the hell… if our working memory is continually processing new information and the amount of effort we put into processing information is called cognitive load and as our cognitive load increases, so does decision fatigue… What can we learn and when can we learn it? And is there a way to learn without making a dumb or impulsive choice?

People who are burned out from making too many decisions suffer not only poorer judgement but reduced self-control, as all these things are regulated in the frontal, executive function part of the brain. Mental energy is finite. Making choices is a burden. When we avoid temptations, it takes mental energy that disables our ability to avoid other temptations. Willpower is a muscle that eventually becomes fatigued by continual use. “Ah, says P, “can we not strengthen this muscle with extra practice?”

“Right now, I am deciding NOT to bop you,” I say. “Does that count?”

I blame the internet and the endless array of choices available to us. We don’t even have to leave the comfort of our couch to get utterly exhausted.

It’s 7:am on a Sunday morning. A woman is texting me pictures of dresses she is thinking of purchasing from an online purveyor of ladies’ dresses. She wants to know if there is something I can do about the sleeves on this one, the hemline on that one… She is conserving her decision juice by off-loading her decisions onto me.

“I’m on the hunt!” she texts briskly. Clearly, thanks to the internet, her hunting times have expanded long beyond the traditional window of 9-5 store hours and rather than confining her search to the local boutique in town, which went out of business ten years ago, she is now “free to” (nay, required) to roam the entire globe. Around here, all we have are thrift shops and hardware stores. “Free shipping” says nothing about the actual speed of the shipping, whose vehicles might include container ship, barge, or yak as part of the journey.

In the good old days, we got by with our limited working memories, short attention spans, impulsivity and the need to finish our errands before we needed a restroom, within in the narrow confines of our home communities and villages. Choices were few but we were happy to make them. But here we are, unmoored in 2026, bobbing in a sea of Choices, with the same amount of Decision Juice that was standard issue for a Neanderthal. No wonder we find ourselves feet first, slamming into a chicken coop, or in a dressing room, asking a seamstress with poop on her boots what we should wear to the wedding of the beloved child we nurtured, raised, advised, educated, and loved with mind-losing intensity and tenacity through every trial and strife…

We cannot decide.

Certain heuristics are as dangerous as grocery shopping while hungry—or just eating whatever we find in the fridge, mold and septic systems be damned.

I’ve learned a lot this week from my beloved customers. We can Keep Mending and make life easier for ourselves and others by doing a few things that make life simpler (if not easier):

To make fewer decisions and thus waste less of the precious Elixir of I-ought-to-care-about-this, create and stick to routines. Delegate (some) decisions to others. Managing and maintaining brain glucose levels through out the day can help. (Yes, Prudence, I DO need a cabinet full of snacks in my shop in order to have the mental fortitude I need to avoid eating between meals!) When you have a choice between Magnificent or (d)rab, always choose Magnificent! And—here’s a big “D” one—Don’t eat anything with mold on it “just to get rid of it.”

That’s all from my cozy corner of Vermont, my Dear Ones! Keep up your Good Work! You might be exhausted—maybe it’s from feeling helpless and choiceless in the face of all the news, maybe it’s Decision Fatigue from too many choices in your own domestic sphere... in either case, “May your decisions reflect your hopes, not your fears.” (–Nelson Mandela) You can Do It!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy