The Art of Discernment Through Action

stopping the spinning in my mind

I’ve had several conversations lately where my friends and I talk about feeling stuck or uncertain in choosing our next life step, or that the path ahead is murky. I think a lot of us have some of this right now, as we continue to recombobulate ourselves after an intense and disorienting couple of years that led many of us to major overhauls in our vocations, friendships, and priorities. 

A key plot device in a novel I read recently was a magical coin. As the story went, the results of flipping it determined several key family decisions over years. It made me think about the way flipping a coin could be clarifying for me, too.

Like I remember being at a restaurant as a kid and stuck between two menu items. Let’s just say my options were: macaroni and cheese and a chicken sandwich (this is such a fake example because we all know macaroni and cheese would win every time). I kept going back and forth in my mind, weighing the various pros and cons, but making no progress deciding. Just as I’d land on one option, the appeal of the other would pull me out of certainty. I kept going in circles. 

Then I had the idea of flipping a coin. But I was a kid, so I didn’t have a coin. So I took what was on the table, a pink Sweet’N Low packet (this was the 80s). I assigned each dinner option a side, and threw the packet in the air, eager to see which side would land face up. But the thing is, (and you know where I’m going here) as soon as I threw it in the air, I felt myself hoping for a certain result.

COME ON NUTRITION FACTS SIDE!!! MAC AND CHEESE FOREVER!!!

Somehow this little exercise allowed me to notice within myself which meal I truly wanted. Moving forward in the process helped shake something loose in my brain. The actual result of flipping the packet didn’t even matter, because the process alone made my choice clear. But for some reason I had to actually throw it in the air.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think this simple coin flip trick works with every life decision; especially not when they become significantly more fraught or consequential than what to have for dinner. But the lesson I take is this:

When I’m going around in circles in my mind, having trouble landing on some life decision, I just need to DO SOMETHING.

By this I mean, take a small step in some direction. Or take small steps in a bunch of different directions. Something non-committal that requires few resources. Things like: send an inquiry email to that grad program, apply for a particular job, sign up for a community class, host a one-time event in your living room. Basically just get out of your brain and actually do some stuff, and see how it feels and what you notice when you’re actually doing it.

When I was in some earlier iterations of my Christian faith, I was taught this sequence:

Fork in road —> God tells me what to do —> I do it

But this has rarely been the order of things in practice. Still, without meaning to, I can sometimes get stuck in that middle step, feeling like I need some clear direction from God before I proceed at all. Often I would even settle for some clear direction from myself; but sometimes I have neither. So I just keep spinning around in my brain: praying and listening, journaling, talking to people, reading articles, doing research, bouncing around in my mind between the options.

What I often need, though, is to get out of my head and get things moving.

This Substack is actually an example of that. When I left my position leading a church and wanted to spend more time on my writing, I had a lot of questions: What should my next book project be? If I’m not doing formal theological/academic writing, what do I want my writer’s voice to be like? What topics do I want to write about? What would my genre be?

Participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, where I wrote a complete novel during the month of November 2022) was a fun action step that started the day after I left my church job. But when that ended, I didn’t really have a direction, so I started doing a lot of research trying to figure out what/how I wanted to write. I talked to the publisher of my first book. Read several books on writing. Took a couple of very low-key writing classes (free! online! from the public library! yay, libraries!). And a bunch of other stuff, all with the goal of figuring out what my new writing niche was going to be.

None of this research was wasted, and I don’t regret it, but I finally realized that best way for me to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be, what my voice would be, what topics I might like to focus on, was through actually writing. 

And so, I made this Substack. (Even that decision was delayed for a while because I couldn’t decide between Medium and Substack. Finally I realized that it didn’t really matter, the most important thing was to just get on with it.)

I committed to writing a post a week, and I’m imagining that after some length of time I’ll be able to look back and find out what kind of writer I may be called to be by noticing what kind of writer I already am. And learning what I gravitate toward by noticing how I actually feel in the process.

I guess this is all just to say: here’s to small exploratory steps as part of our discernment processes and listening to the voice of the Spirit.

Any tiny steps you’re taking these days, to feel things out? Hope they yield some fruitful noticings.