Here is a familiar exchange:
Me: Blah blah, here is my dilemma, what do you think?
Conversant: “Sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it, too.”
Um…duh?
If I give the impression that I am anything but human, who wants anything less than the most of the best I can possibly have, please allow me to hereby set the record straight: I want to have my cake. And eat it too.
Speaking of food, I love going out to eat. I admit I can be a bit scientific when it comes to ordering – I assay my own appetite and degustatory desires, considering the menu’s specialties, season, price-to-value ratio, and the rest of my party’s choices. All that, before landing on the correct beverage pairing. It’s not always easy, but it’s lovely when it works. It’s just that I don’t love when the person sitting next to me orders the exact same thing, I don’t love when the table orders 5 glasses of wine instead of a bottle, I don’t love finding out that the halibut was $2 more than advertised because if I’d wanted to spend $14 I would’ve had the tuna.
The way I engineer these things can be pretty obnoxious, and overthinking this kind of thing can ruin an otherwise simple pleasure. This rarely happens, but I feel a childlike glee when I simply want a slice of pizza. When at least one constant can be cemented down among a cloud of variables, it feels a lot better. Of the zillion restaurants we could go to tonight, we can narrow it down to five because I definitely want pizza.
I struggle with black and white – the world is most alive in gray. When I have a dilemma, I know that the best solution is not this OR that; it is one that incorporates the best part of this with the best part of that. When I find the solution, it’s always compromise among options. This is why even after I have the menu of choices before me, I spend some time considering and marinating and imagining. I may appear idle, but there are actually combinations and permutations firing off in my head, hunting for the right answer.
In my experience, the right answer reveals itself slowly, and then all of the sudden. It begins by nudging and shouldering the other options until EUREKA! I finally pay attention to it and acknowledge its superiority over other options.
Life does not often afford the time required to make decisions this way. Sometimes, the waitress comes before I’m ready for her, and I just have to pick something on the fly. When this happens, I always feel a little bit anxious after ordering and may even try to change it. Sometimes you just don’t know you want something until its no longer an option. If I change it, sometimes I wish I hadn’t.
But it seems perfectly natural to want time to slow down if you could use more of it, or to want two seemingly mutually exclusive opportunities to be possible simultaneously. Of course I don’t want choosing Door A to mean that I will never, ever be able to open Door B.
So instead of, “Which?” isn’t the question better question, “How?” Instead of “Do I want what’s behind Door A or Door B?” why not, “How can I get what I need from behind Door A and Door B?” An imaginative approach to a dilemma can unglue useless assumptions, clarify wants and needs, and yield an altogether better choice than first imagined.
If I sound like I want it all, it’s because I do. The only way I can be sure not to have it all is to ignore even the possibility. This is why I like the gray area, where asking “How?” turns a clash into a collaboration. Even if the possibilities only start as hypothetical – well, how does anything real begin? That’s how bridges get built, right? From prototypes? Why not embrace solution prototypes? Non-physical solutions can follow the same process.
If you want to have your cake and not eat it, too…well, no problem. I’ll take your slice. And have mine, too.
