I was prompted to write this after driving home from hospital the other day. My wife’s temporary residence there has meant me trying every route from home to hospital to find out which might be the best. There are three routes that I can take –

• The motorway. This should be quickest but it rarely is as there are usually queues to get on and off at either end. These queues can be quite horrendous at rush hour so this option is chancy and can turn out to be the slowest by far
• A narrow country road which can only be driven down slowly and is quite a few miles longer. However, there is very little queueing even at rush hours
• A main road which runs alongside the motorway. A sort of halfway house, as it’s shorter in distance than the country road but it can still hit a queue at the end

So, one of these routes will be the optimum at any given time of day but which one?

So, the other day, I definitely picked the wrong one or so I thought. There were road works and traffic lights on the country road which delayed me for quite some time. This annoyed me a little until I remembered an article that I had read just the day before about the actor Mark Rylance. It was entitled Don’t be frightened of chaos and there was one section that really resonated with me –

“Steven Spielberg offered him Empire of the Sun but Rylance turned him down (after throwing the I Ching), instead opting for a triumphant season at the National (Theatre), where he met his wife, the composer and director Claire van Kampen. He went on to become founding artistic director at the Globe, with van Kampen working alongside him.”

I Ching is an ancient divination technique which Mark used to decide which road to take, either to Hollywood or to the theatre. It can be as simple as flipping a coin. From the above, I would guess that the I Ching took him down the best possible road. He ended up working for Spielberg anyway with a memorable performance as the spy Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies. So, what has this got to do with FOLO and my routes to and from the hospital?

I was thinking of Mark’s use of the I Ching while I was stuck at the traffic lights and realised that we make decisions all the time and sometimes they seem as random as if we too had thrown a coin. Then we ruin it by wondering if we’ve made the wrong choice or, in other words, FOLO (fear of losing out). I had taken the option of the country road and it hadn’t worked out. I lost out because I then realised that the motorway would have been the best choice.

I try to follow the Stoics and they believe that our reasoned choices are the only thing in this world that we can truly control. So I stopped my FOLO anxiety in its tracks and tried to think as to why I’d made the choice of the country road in the first place. Stuck in the queue, I saw a little clump of bright red poppies by the roadside. All around me there were green fields and the road ahead was lined with a canopy of tree branches that swayed in the warm breeze. I realised then why I had made the choice. It was June and the sun was out and the beauty of the Hertfordshire countryside was all around me. It also dawned on me that I was better off stuck in a queue looking at the delicate beauty of a poppy than whizzing down a motorway at speed and seeing nothing.

So, when you make a choice, try to analyse why and make a reasoned choice if you can. However, like Mark, you sometimes have to throw a coin in the air and go with whatever the universe tells you. A decision, once made with your reasoned choice, is then the only decision you could have made and FOLO should never be a factor. Even if you end up throwing a coin in the air, it will be your reasoned choice that has decided on this action.

If you adopt this way of thinking then the decision made is the only one you could have made at the time and so there will be no FOLO, no regrets and no time wasted on thinking about what might have been.

(Thanks to Geralt and 1195798 for the nice photos)