16 Making Sensitive Decisions

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Feelings, Wishes, and Necessity

Even when we are attentive to a situation and we feel some level of happiness, interest, and compassion about it, and some level of willingness to become involved, we need to respond sensitively and appropriately. Frequently, we need to decide between three choices: doing what we feel like doing, what we want to do, and what we need to do. Decisions involving someone else add the further choices between what the person wants and what he or she needs. Some or all these choices may coincide. Often, however, they differ. Choosing either what we want or feel like doing over what is needed, or what the other person wants over what he or she needs, is a form of insensitivity. When we make such a choice, we frequently feel guilty. This overreaction happens because we experience what we need to do dualistically as what we should do. On one side stands a defiant "me" and on the other the unsavory action that we should do, but are not doing. Usually, a moralistic judgment accompanies the dualistic appearance.

Deconstructing the decision-making process, by using images such as a balloon bursting, resolves any tension over the issue of "should." In place of what we should do, this process leaves what we need to do. Yet, we might not know what we need to do or what someone else needs. To find out, we may rely on the five types of deep awareness, knowledge, experience, intuition, discrimination, and trustworthy external sources of advice.

Even when we know what we need to do, we may neither want to do it, nor feel like doing it. We may still feel tension, even if the issue of "should" does not complicate the matter. Do we need to be insensitive to our wishes or feelings? Is it an overreaction to feel frustration and disappointment at needing to ignore either one or both of them?

The issue is complex. Four combinations may occur between what we want and what we feel like doing. Suppose, for example, we are overweight and we know that we need to diet.

  1. We may want to keep our diet, but not feel like doing so when our favorite cake is served for dessert.
  2. We may feel like sticking to our diet, but not want to do so when we have paid much money for a hotel room and a breakfast buffet is included.
  3. We may both feel like keeping to our diet and want to do so when people tell us how fat we have become.
  4. We may neither want to keep, nor feel like keeping our diet when we are aggravated about something and want to drown our annoyance by eating cake.

In each case, we may choose either to eat some cake or to exercise restraint. How do we make a sensitive decision that we do not later regret?

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