Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,13

of our kids, and we were struggling. How could we know which one would suit us best? I asked my friend, a retired schoolteacher, for her thoughts.

“I can’t tell you what you should do,” she said, “but I know how I would decide.” When she’s debating between options, she always gives preference to the one closer to home, because she wants her life to be rooted in her neighborhood as much as possible. She wants to actually know her neighbors, and she doesn’t want to spend her life in the car. So when she’s deciding between multiple options, she chooses the option closest to home unless there is a persuasive reason not to. This holds true for big decisions, like choosing which school to attend, and smaller ones, like where to buy groceries or get her hair cut or find a book club. She wants to live her life in actual physical community, and she welcomes the opportunity to bump into her neighbors at carpool or her fellow book club members at the grocery store.

I nodded as my friend described her big-picture value of community, recognizing that Will and I valued this same thing. In fact, we’d moved to our current home a few years ago because the new location aligned more clearly with our values: we were seeking a neighborhood that was more walkable, closer to the places we already spent our time, and more diverse, both racially and socioeconomically.

As my friend described her family’s schooling choices, I realized our common value of community could guide my own family’s schooling decisions as well—and our excruciating choice suddenly became a lot easier. And so this year, my son transferred to a new school just a few blocks from our home. Now we walk to school and see school families in the neighborhood and bump into them at the library. This choice has felt right for who we are as a family, because it reflects what we care about.

Our Values Can Influence How We Spend Our Time and Money

When we harness a values-driven decision-making process, we can proactively allocate our resources for the things that matter most to us. In my own family, Will and I value showing up. It hasn’t always been this way. This is a value we first had to discover and then begin to consciously rely on when making decisions.

We started hesitantly living out this value years ago when we were invited to visit college friends we hadn’t seen in a while. We said we believe people are a good use of our time, money, and energy, and there’s no substitute for being there in person. And so to consistently live out this value, we knew we should go—even though the trip was poorly timed, and several of our children still needed diapers, naps, and early bedtimes. A friend once put it like this: “If you care, you’ll be there. If you don’t, you won’t.” This little rhyme is not an inviolable rule but a rule of thumb, and it’s sprung to mind when we’ve had to make difficult choices in the intervening years.

Naming “showing up” a big-picture value has made those choices much easier, and we’ve grown accustomed to making decisions this way. We travel to be at weddings without endlessly debating if the trip is “worth it.” We recently bought pricey plane tickets for an inconvenient family reunion, because there’s nothing like being there. When friends invited us to join them in celebrating a big family milestone hundreds of miles away, it took just a few minutes to decide. We could make the trip happen, so we did. We sometimes meet up with old friends in faraway places, not for a wedding or graduation, but just because everyone’s getting together. This value applies to my work as well. I prioritize visits with writer friends and colleagues, both in town and across the country, because I’ve never regretted making the effort to see people in person.

We don’t show up only for life’s big moments, but having experienced the significance of showing up, we try to be there for the small ones as well. When people we love are celebrating, we try to be there, in person, to celebrate with them. When people we love are hurting, we try to be there for them, even if we can’t “fix” anything. If you care, you’ll be there.

We don’t live out this value perfectly, because no matter how much we care, we can’t always be there. Sometimes it’s prohibitively