Old Charlie pulled out a wooden hand saw from the old tool box in my shed and admired it.  When my wife and I bought our 19th century farmhouse on McNutt’s Island last year, we inherited a shed and with it a host of shed artifacts including an old toolbox with a wood-handled saw in it.  “You hardly see anybody using these things anymore,” he said turning the blade from side to side.  “You see how these teeth here stick out in opposite directions from each other?”   His voice sounded the tone of an expert about to teach a newbie.  “If the teeth didn’t do that,” he said pausing to look at his student, “if they were just straight like the body of the blade, the whole saw would get stuck in the middle of the cut.  You’d never get to first base with whatever you were cutting.” 

I leaned closer to look at the teeth of the blade.  “That way, you see, the teeth not only cut the wood, but they cut a path in the wood wide enough for the blade itself to pass through.”  He stood back with the look of a satisfied teacher.  “I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

“You’re right,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

He beamed.

That was the end of the lesson, as far as Charlie was concerned.  But such lessons can cut a lot of ways, and it wasn’t long before I got to thinking about how something as simple as a saw blade can apply to how we make decisions and what we need in order to make up our mind about things.

Let’s think for a moment about the actual experience of deciding something:  We try to weigh the benefits and then the costs.  We consider our goals.  We listen to our hopes and fears, our enthusiasm and our resistance.  Maybe we go back and forth, like a farmer atop a wobbly cart.   

Some people call that waffling. ( “Make up your mind,” they taunt.)  I call it “discernment” - weighing our choices before we choose.  It is a skill worth developing. 

In a healthy decision-making process, 90% of our energy should go into discerning what is the most effective choice for the most desired gain.  Yet if we listen to the urgings of our culture to think fast and make a speedy decision, if we push ourselves to a premature decision, we may only confuse ourselves, end up anxious and stuck, and ultimately not get what we want.

Instead, we help ourselves by giving our decision-making process some room to consider both sides of the issue at hand, to talk things over with ourselves  (“On the one hand - on the other hand….”) When we do this, we allow ourselves to travel down one decision road, and then the other, surveying the landscape.  We  “try on” each path, weighing its merit, sensing its benefit.  We model ourselves after the old saw in my shed, creating a path large enough to arrive at a decision we are happy about.

Discernment is a necessary component of our decision-making.  True, it may require more time, but in the end we are more likely to be content with what we have decided.  Here, slow is better than fast.  Creating enough room to think things through, we are ready to cut through any tough issue, and that’s a skill worth keeping in any toolbox.