The Awful Truth About Decision Making

I never used to have any trouble making decisions. My path seemed straight and narrow and, except for a stumble here and there along the way, the relatively inconsequential kind most of us make, I kept to it fairly well. There was right and there was wrong and that was pretty much that. But. As I get older, there seems to be a bit more gray area in life than there used to be. Take for example my photography / digital art ….

This is a newish version of a popular image on my website, Chanticleer, this one with more blue tones in the sky and a few other nuance-y tweaks that I’m probably the only one who notices.

Chanticleer In Blue © Lois Bryan Photography and Digital Art

A few blogs back ( Colorful Drinks On The House ) I announced that I’d made up my mind to go ahead and, if the spirit moved me, add different color variations of similar images to my photography / digital art galleries. I hadn’t been doing a lot of that. But after some thought and nosing around seeing what other contemporary photography / digital artists were up to, I decided to cut loose and add variations more often.

Then I promptly changed my mind.

With Chanticleer, here, I gave a lot of thought to switching the original out and adding the above, but as popular as it’s been, I decided not to mess with success.

I guess it’s one of those cases where I reserve the right to change my mind … even when I can’t make up my mind.

But I wonder, does the old adage that it’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind still hold water in this modern day of women’s / equal rights? Do women no longer have that special back door … or … does it mean that men get to change their minds now, too? (Apparently, they didn’t used to??) I have the feeling we’re all supposed to be very self-aware and sure of ourselves these days, so my vague musings probably seem quaint and old fashioned to this forward thinking, determined and assured younger generation.

So, there I was earlier today, sitting on that same cold hard fence of indecision a lot of us have spent time on,

Flame Trees © Lois Bryan Photography and Digital Art

doing exactly what I said I wasn’t going to do … adding a second version of an image to my website that had a slight but, to me, significant change.

The reason for the addition actually makes sense, in a rather round-about way. I’d uploaded the original to my website, and it became fairly popular within a relatively short period of time. But before that short period of time actually had time to elapse, I’d created some greeting cards from it with a slightly different color tone, the one included above. And that newer edition of the card has been one of my most popular.

Now, every time I sell that card, I feel myself leaning toward that version … and … every time the original wall-art version sells, I lean the other way.

Basically, I’m getting a bit sea-sick.

So here I go. Hopping off the fence and changing my mind again.