Choices
How do you decide?
Everybody who is in to football knows every game starts with a coin toss. The winner gets to pick whether they get the ball to start the game or start on defense. You would think that the winner would like to start the game with the ball, but in recent years teams have often chosen to start on defense. There are a couple reasons for this. One, often times it is easier to start on defense and concentrate on frustrating the other team’s offense -even seeking to make them turn it over, either on downs or by a fumble or touchdown. Two, in the second half the roles are reversed and it is often more valuable to start the second half with the ball, whether you are behind or ahead.
Flipping a coin is one dramatic way to make a choice when all things are equal. As kids we often did eeny-meeny-miney-mo or one-potato, two-potato when we were choosing sides or other minor decisions. It was a quick way to make a decision, and you just needed a coin.
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Sometimes we wish everything could be that easy. Decisions can be hard. We list pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages with any choice. We research and strategies in many areas of life — moving, jobs, marriage, etc. And the longer we live the more choices we have to make.
We also tend to second guess ourselves — like, “maybe two out of three?”. Or maybe like deciding on go with tails when the coin comes up heads. We are like Robert Frost hesitating over which road to take in the yellow wood. We often agonize over making the ‘right’ choice, when in fact there are many choices that are right, just like many questions have multiple “right’ answers.
My wife and I have often talked about bad choices that we made earlier in life, but saw how the end result of some of those choices led us together, so we don’t fret over them because the end result was great. I also have thought that we may have made better choices and still ended up together, because I believe we were meant to be. Whatever, we celebrate our togetherness and seek to make wise decisions going forward.
Good decision making is important, but some are worthy of only a coin flip. There is a story I learned growing up in the great state of Oregon. Two founders of a river port city in the state had a conflict over what to call it. Asa Lovejoy wanted to name it Boston after his hometown in Massachusetts, while Francis Pettygrew wanted to name it Portland after his hometown in Maine. They decided to settle the argument over dinner using a two-out-of-three coin toss. Pettygrew won and it is now called Portland and the coin is preserved in the Oregon Historical Society Museum. Either way it is a great city, the city of my birth.
And by the way there is a city in Oregon that shares it name with a Massachusetts — the city of Salem (city of peace) which is the state capital.
