There are decisions that are not born when the mind is full. They emerge when excess grows weary, when arguments repeat themselves, when logic begins to spin in place. It is curious: we spend years believing that deciding well means gathering reasons, collecting data, listening to opinions, making lists. But life, at times, chooses another path. It waits for silence.
Rubem Alves used to say that an empty mind is not the devil’s workshop, but a playroom. A place where words stop being tools and return to being toys. Where thinking is no longer about explaining, but about playing. Where gravity gives way to laughter and, for a few moments, the world slips out of order. Perhaps it is precisely there that the most important decisions begin to take shape.
Because no one moves to another city at the height of certainty. No one leaves a thirty-year marriage after neatly closing an emotional spreadsheet. No one abandons a religion, accepts an offer that will turn daily life upside down, decides whether or not to have a child, gets a definitive tattoo, moves abroad or switches careers simply because it “makes sense.”
These decisions tend to arise when meaning itself no longer suffices.
They appear when the mind empties enough for another register to speak, when we stop trying to explain what we feel and allow ourselves to feel it. When something learned by heart, in its older meaning rooted in the heart itself, begins to pulse. The mind may forget, Rubem Alves reminded us, but what is learned by the heart is never forgotten.
Perhaps that is why deciding is less an act of courage than a gesture of listening. Listening to the body, to exhaustion, to desire, to what insists even when we try to silence it. In such moments, deciding is not about choosing the best path, but about recognizing the one that can no longer be avoided.
Rubem Alves played with words the way one tosses small stones into the air. When they fell back, they were never the same. To explain, he reminded us, comes from explanare: to make flat. To smooth mountains, fill in abysses, eliminate mystery. But life does not care much for being explained. It prefers folds, ridges, precipices. It prefers choices that do not fit into well-organized sentences.
Perhaps that is why some people postpone decisions for years, waiting for the moment when everything will be clear. But clarity, more often than not, is merely an overlit world without shadows, without relief, without wonder. And there are decisions that only appear when we accept walking without a map, trusting touch more than sight.
Changing jobs, leaving a relationship, abandoning an old project, saying no to what has always been expected of us, all of these require a kind of wisdom that is not measured by the amount of information one possesses, but by the ability to taste things. To know when something no longer nourishes. When what once made sense has begun to weigh. When continuing costs more than changing.
At its core, every important decision carries a discreet, almost invisible mourning. One decides, and in doing so leaves behind lives that could have been lived, versions of ourselves that will not move forward, futures that will never find their way into the present. Perhaps that is why deciding hurts. Not because we were wrong, but because every choice implies a loss. And perhaps maturity is not about learning how to avoid that loss, but about finding an ethical way to sustain it.
Rubem Alves liked to mess with the well-ordered world. To turn dreams upside down. Perhaps writing and deciding are close relatives. Both require a certain emptying out. A momentary release from gravity. A brief return to childhood, where play was a serious matter.
In the end, perhaps deciding is this:
to toss the stones into the air
and accept that, when they fall back,
they are never the same
neither the world,
nor us.
Reference
Alves, R. (2021). Ao professor, com carinho: a arte do pensar e do afeto (pp. 65–71). São Paulo, SP: Planeta.
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