Indecisive Much?

How about this for the best metaphor ever describing indecision?

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Atilla and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many other figs I couldn't quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but chosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, the plopped to the ground at my feet."


well, hmmmm.....Indecision is pretty deadly. This is the conclusion I am slowly coming to, from a person who is probably one of the (if not the) most indecisive people in the world. It affects everything and everyone - it riddles literature throughout the ages, from Hamlet's massive confusion and failure to act leading to the death of almost every character in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Prince Hamlet to the quote above with Esther, in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. It's in scripture, from "Choose this day whom you will serve....no man can serve two masters, he will hate the one and love the other" to "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven" to "if any man will follow me, he must deny his father, and mother, and brother". There is no good advice, in the history of the world, that says anything like "Well, just hang on for as long as you can, keep all your options open, and never choose anything for fear that it might be the wrong choice."

Where did I get that idea, then?