decisions, decisions, decisions

If any of you have ever taken an accounting class from BYU it is possible you took it from Norm Nemrow.  He taught many years at BYU and I think was one of the best teachers I had.  It was an introduction to accounting and I learned accounting was not the career path for me, but I learned quite a bit.

One of the things I remember from accounting is the concept of a "sunk cost."  The basic premise is  that once you have spent money on something, whether it turns out to be a good purchase or a bad purchase, you should not determine future spending based on previous spending.  For a better explanation you can check it out here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs

I treat many of my decision with this concept in mind.  I typically don't have "buyers remorse" because I can't change the situation, I might as well make the best of it.  Trust me, I have made some pretty bad purchases, and Alisa reminded me of those regularly, but I just decided to make the best of it and move on.  This also means that when I am making a decision I will gather all the relevant information and then decide.  If it is wrong, I deal with it, confident I made the best decision possible with the information I had at the time.

I tell you all this because I realized over the last couple weeks, that much of my confidence relied on my ability to talk to Alisa about the decisions and get her thoughts and feelings on the situation.

Out of all the hard things we have faced over the last 2 months, trying to make decisions (one in particular) is by far the hardest thing for me to do.  Let me explain.

We received an amazing offer from a friend to accompany him on a river trip the third week of August.  I immediately said we were interested, and left it at that.  As I started looking at our schedule for August leading up to school I started to get nervous about going on this trip.  For a week I wanted to talk to someone (Alisa) about what would be best.  I couldn't think of anyone else I could rely on to give me the advice I needed.  I finally ended up talking to the boys, co-workers, friends, and family.  I was hoping for a consensus, and instead received good advice, split between going on the trip, or skipping it.

Finally, I decided that it was too much for us to make this trip.  The school year will be a new chapter for us, and I felt like I needed some runway to prepare.  I think the boys were a little disappointed, but they have been awesome and understood that maybe this is not our year for this trip.

I have not really been afraid of what we face without Alisa, until I realized I am solely responsible for our family decisions, and there are many more to come, and they will likely be more critical than a river trip.  The prospect of making those hard decisions without Alisa, that is scary.