The Italian word decidere, English for to decide, comes from the much older, Latin words de and caedere. Its original etymology is rooted in the idea of cutting off or severing alternatives. The core idea is this: when you truly decide something, you're cutting off all the possible universes/alternatives/branches that are currently blocking you. In other words, a choice carries within it a sacrifice: you must let go of everything else.

This skill - to choose - seems relatively easy on paper. However, our currently unfolding reality, especially in the more technologically evolved parts of our planet, has complicated it much further. We now live in an almost perennial shining object syndrome - a state of mind in which the overabundance of alternatives, of literally and figuratively swiping between always-more-beautiful-and-exciting partners, cities, jobs and paths - makes it really easy to not choose at all.

And not choosing, however, is already a choice: you're choosing not to choose, and - doing so - you're superpositioning your entire life. You're telling the universe: wait, I'm not really ready. It works - again, only on paper. For a while, you get to try it all. But the risk you run is much deeper: in a world where you could be anything and do anything, at all times, you risk losing your true purpose. You're sidequesting until your main quest - the deep core purpose you'd once grasped - will be gone.

Freedom is relative: too little is a prison, but too much is an equivalent cell whose bars are the except opposite of confinement: they are made of excess possibility.

The art of truly choosing is one of the core, human skills that needs to be re-learnt in this century.

At Pensiero, we'll try to help it as much as we (humanly) can.