The overarching theme of this post is ice cream. I added some inaction so that it would feel like I was talking about something meaningful. Please enjoy.
I once went to an ice cream parlour in Paris (no, I’m not saying that to be all fancy, stay with me). If you’ve ever been to a European ice cream parlour, gelato house, or glace palace, you’ll know that there are so many flavours that it makes the whole of Baskin-Robbins look like a singular tub of generic supermarket ice cream.
I stood in front of all of those flavours, box after box of colour, trying to decide what I should have. There was one called pitufo. It was bright blue and means smurf, those little blue people that are constantly running from the evil wizard Gargamel. They had nutella, pistachio, basil, strawberry, the salty caramel tears of Judas.
After a few minutes of holding up the queue and causing a bit of a stir behind me (Parisians do not like to wait), I gave up and wandered back outside again. I was in my twenties and a bit of a people -pleaser back then, before you judge me too harshly.
My inaction was not choosing an ice cream. It was not born of apathy though. I really fucking wanted some of that incredible looking ice cream. What I had done is seen that people were getting annoyed behind me and chose to remove myself from the queue instead.
So there was a choice involved. I didn’t gaze into the abyss and then mindlessly walk outside. I chose to walk outside. It’s here that I think we need to be careful when talking about inaction. To me, it all comes down to perspective.
From one angle, I chose inaction. From another angle, I chose to leave the glace palace. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t choose. It was that the weight of potentially causing conflict with the people behind me was heavier than my desire for ice cream.
Personally, I would struggle to think of a time when I was ever absent of choice. I feel that our entire life is a never ending stream of choices. Some large, some small. Some so infinitesimal that we barely even notice that we’ve made them. Yet they’re still present, and they still have impact.
Have you ever come across that moral conundrum called The Trolley Dillemma? In case you haven’t, let me give you a quick low down (I guarantee I’ll explain it and you’ll remember).
Get nice and comfortable. Take a little breath in. Hold it. And let it go. Ready?
I’d like you to imagine that you are standing beside some train tracks. You look to your left and see a train thundering towards you. To your right are five railway workers who can’t hear you shouting at them to move and even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the way in time.
As you glance down, you notice a lever at your feet that will divert the train onto another track, saving the five workers.
Lo and behold, however, that down that other track is a single worker. Equally oblivious to his impending doom and unable to hear you.
What do you do? Pull the lever to save five, or do nothing and let fate take it’s course?
It’s a bit of a grim moral exploration, but I think it highlights the idea of inaction as a choice really well. If we pull the lever, we’re actively choosing to save five people and sacrifice one. If we choose inaction, we’re passively stepping back and letting the Universe do it’s thing.
Whichever we choose, we are choosing. So next time you decide to take inaction, think about what choice you're making instead.
Much love
David