Should I post this?

Dominic mentioned recently on Critical Mass that Peter Hammill tells us that the older you get the better able you are to make decisions but the fewer choices there are available to you.

What are the things that have the most impact over who we are and how we spend our time and over which we have control? Some would say that you choose your parents and that this life is entirely predestined but if we put that to one side for the moment, the answer is 'decisions'. At any given moment, we can take a decision or not. More so than working hard (although you can decide to do that) or the amount of effort we put into our daily lives generally, the decisions we choose to take have more of an impact on us than anything else we can do.

If I had not decided to move to London when I was 22 I would be living somewhere else, doing a different job, living with a different person and so on, (assuming I hadn't been run over and killed the day after I had been due to move).

Most of the best times I have had have resulted from decisions I have made, and certainly most of the worst times can be attributed to not making a decision at all, more so than making bad decisions. So my ability to make decisions is the single thing (over which I have some control) which has most influence in my life.

But when I was at school, for some reason, they wanted to teach me what year the Prussians invaded Bolivia instead of how to take decisions.

(The Barefoot Doctor suggests that you might as well decide to be happy, which should be a relatively easy decision to take even if you believe that everything is predestined).