“Decide what to be and go be it,” in that exact wording, is The Avett Brothers, from Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise, 2009. The instruction underneath it is about nineteen hundred years older. Epictetus, in the Discourses: first say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do. Like many adages, it is an oversimplification of profound truth. The line does not say “hope what to be” or “want to be.” It says decide.
Hoping, wanting, intending, wishing: none of these really have a lot of power to change much. It is when we make a firm decision, when there is a clear yes and a clear no, when there is no wishy-washiness but a solid determination, only then can we be that which we desire, because desire isn’t enough on its own.
The word carries it. Decide comes from the Latin for cutting off, the same root that sits under a word like pesticide. To decide is to kill something. Every road you do not take dies at the moment you choose, and that small death is the whole of the power. This is why wanting cannot do the work. Wanting keeps all the roads alive.
When we decide we are making a choice between one or more options. When we decide, we put all other options than the one we’ve chosen in the past, so that the only option becomes the one we have decided upon. The adage, then, becomes a bit redundant, because once we make a decision what to be, we will inevitably be that, because it is decided already.
There are corollary adages, “fake it till you make it” and “act as if,” which both speak to the power of stepping into a reality that is not yet cemented. But it is stepping into the reality that creates the reality itself.
There is a documentary I highly recommend that shows this process, called Kumaré, in which an American of Indian descent decides to become a guru in order to get across the message that we are all our own gurus. He let his hair grow long, spoke with an accent, put on the robes, practiced yoga and meditation, and even made up poses and meditations for his followers. And after a while, he became the guru. While I have an ethical issue with the use of deception to teach a principle, the learning from this is that Vikram Gandhi made a decision to be the guru, then he became the guru in a more real sense than even he’d anticipated. He decided. He became.
Wanting something and not accomplishing it is information, not a character flaw. It is the clearest indicator there is that the decision has not been made. There is no clear yes and no clear no, only a want left running in the background for a year, or five, or twenty, costing something the whole time. So if you want to be an author, you have to decide to be that. If you want to be fit, you must decide to be that. If you want to be more forgiving, loving, mindful, ethical, you must make a choice.
Not everything undone is an undecided thing. Some roads are closed by money, by a body that will not do what you ask of it, by other people’s needs that are not up for negotiation. Like all wisdom teachings, this one has to be balanced, and its shadow is this: said carelessly, it becomes a stick, and the person who has decided and still cannot move gets told they never really wanted it.
Then there is the other case, and it is the more common one. You have decided. You mean it. You still do not move. Something in you is holding a veto, and it is not laziness and it is not sabotage. A part of you looked at the road you chose and saw a cost you had not counted. Maybe the fit version of you gets looked at in a way the younger you learned to dread. Maybe the author version of you can be judged, and the woman who has been talking about the book for a year cannot be. That part has serious concerns about the path you have decided on, and it has not been consulted.
Which means it is not made in the mind alone, and it is not made once. It is made again at the table, with everyone who lives in you present. A yes that some part of you never agreed to is not a decision. It is an announcement, and the parts that were not asked will go on voting a veto on your unilateral decision.
See if you can tell the two apart. For me, it is the most reliable instrument I have found for this. A wish sits high in me and will not settle. It moves. It comes back at odd hours with a new argument. A decision drops, and then it is quiet, and it has a kind of solid knowingness in it. The question stops arriving and becomes a fact. Your body is the authority on your body. Try that on. If it is not yours, go find what yours does instead.
The decisions that changed my life were rarely the loud ones. No lightning, no vow, no date I could point to afterward. Just a morning where the arguing had stopped and there was nothing left to do but the thing.
May we all know the power of choice.
May we follow our hearts’ desires and decide to be our best selves.
May who we become be in service to our greater good
and the good of those we come in contact with.