Correct?

Decisions.  I have never been good at making them.  And blaming it on my starsign (‘I’m a Pisces, we swim both ways!’) just doesn’t seem to cut it when the decisions that I am now making are potentially life changing.

But the thing with decisions is that there will always be a gut instinct that tells you what your body thinks is the right answer.  I have had a lot of these pit-of-your-stomach feelings over the past few days.  My impatience and desperation to find graduate employment has led to me signing up to a hundred and one things, thinking that it is the right thing to do and then realising that it just doesn’t feel right – usually when I have successfully got the place.

But should we be able to make these decisions?  Or with newspapers falling around us, jobs generally far-and-few and redundancy figures higher than Murdoch’s weekly wage, should we take whatever we can and hold on to it?  Should we agree to working for a company that we don’t want to, or a job that has never appealed to us, thinking that ‘we can hack it for a year and make some money for the next thing’?  Or should we be picky with what we want to do with the rest of our lives, optimistic that we will be one of the lucky ones who finds a dream job and certainly not one of those graduates who has been searching for over a year, like your mum’s colleague Eileen’s son’s girlfriend.

What I have come to realise is, that making decisions is hard.  And unfortunately our parents can’t (and won’t) be there to tell us what to do anymore.  When I asked my mother to ‘guide meeeeee’ in an overtly whiney, ridiculous and annoying voice she said that I need to do what I want to do.  Not what she does, or my father does, or what her colleague Eileen does.  Decisions are about a day or two of long, hard thinking.  The sort of long, hard thinking that pondering Pooh bear does with Piglet, or Carrie does with her Apple Mac.

Patience truly is a virtue and when our decisions now may change the paths of our lives for the next few years, we really do need to make the right ones.  So when I received a call that I had been waiting for today, on the day before I was about to accept a different offer that I don’t think I truly wanted, then I realised.  You realise what the right decision is and when you’ve reached it – believe me, it feels good.  Good luck to those making decisions over the next few weeks.  Do what is right for you.