I like to think of myself as a fairly decisive person. It takes me a while to make up my mind, but once I’ve thought things through I generally know what I want, and I stick to it. There is some dithering in the beginning while I try to hold all the possibilities open, but I am generally pretty comfortable making the final call.

In some seasons of life, though, there are a lot of decisions to be made. And I’ve found that they usually come all at once. It’s never one major decision, but six. In those moments, I find myself feeling terribly indecisive. The decision muscle gets overworked, and suddenly something as simple as choosing what’s for dinner is just too much. Even simple things can be hard to choose when you’re busy re-deciding the whole rest of your life.

(I know I’m being a wee bit cryptic here…everything is fine, the changes/decisions are good ones to have to make, and we’re excited about them. Still, the news isn’t out yet in all the appropriate corners, and it’s best for it to come in the right ways. And no, we are not having a baby. I feel the need to say that right off. Just so you know. No getting excited.)

So let’s just say that I am feeling a bit overwhelmed by the current bounty of choice. I don’t know what to work on. I can’t seem to focus on any one thing long enough to make any particular progress on it before spiraling off to do or research some other important thing. Me being indecisive is pretty unusual. Me being unfocused is downright unheard of, but so it is.

So, I’m keeping my head down and working on what’s next, directly ahead of me. Anything with time pressure comes first, so preparing for the fiber show will be top of the heap for the next two weeks. In that spirit, I sat down last night and spun up a sample:

I want one sample for each kind of wool that I sell, and realized that I am short a Shetland and a Rambouillet from the new supplier. I’m 2 oz in, and have a slightly overplied sock weight yarn, chain plied to keep the color repeats pure. I am kind of surprised at how much I love it. But maybe that’s just because it is solid evidence that I have actually managed to produce one whole skein of yarn. That feels like a good reason to love it.

Something in the spinning must have relaxed my brain, because the “possibilities!” side kicked in first thing this morning. Usually I welcome a visit from the possibilities generator. Even if I don’t end up following any of the crazy paths it suggests, it’s usually a fun ride. But this time, it just brings more decisions. Do I spin the other 2 oz the same way, leave it unspun as part of the sample to show how a gradient-dyed braid will spin up, or do I split it into thin strips of a quarter the thickness of the original top to get a second skein with shorter color repeats as an instructive example of the kinds of control we have as spinners? (This would be particularly interesting if the yarn were worked as stripes in some unknown future project; alternating between the short and long color repeats could do all kinds of interesting things. But then, what would I do with it?)

So here’s the question: do I finish the spinning as I had originally planned, or do I take this opportunity to play?

It’s just a sample, so it really shouldn’t matter what I do. And yet, something needs to be decided, and I’m not sure I have the brain power to do it. Common sense says to keep it simple because I don’t need one more thing to think about. But I also have an almost irresistible temptation to play…