Making Decisions

One of those autumn days when you wonder why you are flying away…

Life’s a series of decisions. Decide, act on the decision, adapt when necessary. Little decisions. Big decisions. One after the other.

Trump’s apparent inability to make decisions about what to do in Iran leaves the world wondering where to next… And left us wondering whether to go to the northern hemisphere on our planned bikepacking trip.

Trump declared a cease fire that isn’t a cease fire because Iran, Israel and the USA are all still taking military action. A cease fire with no end point other than a demand for Iran to come up with a unified proposal. The purported premise is Iran’s leadership is too fractured to come up with a single proposal. The actual reason is…? Trump is trying to keep the American population on side by being simultaneously belligerent but non-combative? That’s a non-decision!

According to Wikipedia, ceasefire agreements are more likely to be durable when they reduce incentives to attack, reduce uncertainty about the adversary’s intentions, and when mechanisms are put in place to prevent accidents from spiralling into conflict. None of these three appears true for the Iran ceasefire. It’s more like the combatants have, at least temporarily, lost their interest in a physical fight and are waiting to see what else might happen. While people suffer – in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, and across the globe as fuel supplies dwindle and prices rise.

Three weeks ago we got tired of waiting for Trump to do something decisive and decided we would go bikepacking (we leave for Europe tomorrow). There was always another deadline in the Iran war and then another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). We got tired of checking the news on a daily (or hourly) basis to see what was new and attempt to deduce the impact of any news on our planned trip. Will there be fuel? Will there be flights? Who knows!

“You can always go another year,” one friend said. However, time feels like it’s getting shorter and we might not be able to go another year, whether it’s our bodies or a mad despot getting in the way. We’d already booked our tickets to Europe and we stuck with our decision. Europe will be our warm-up for cycling in central Asia. In January, I decided I wanted to go to Pakistan. I’ve wanted to go there for years. Unfortunately, the same sort thing that’s prevented me going to Pakistan previously happened again. Pakistan went to war with Afghanistan. Then the oil shortage shut down the country. And now they’re waiting for negotiations which means shutting down Islamabad (our entry point) for weeks at a time.

Plan B is fly to East Kazakhstan and cycle from Oskemen (don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it, I hadn’t till a few weeks ago) through the Kazakh Altai, then the Kazakh part of Xinjiang (Autonomous Region of China), to the Mongolian Altai. I’ve found two reports on the internet of people who have done this so it must be possible. Or at least sometimes possible. We will find out. Plan B is close to execution phase.

Execution phase might be an unfortunate turn of phrase though, because we also had to make a decision this week to euthanise our second cat, Tui. Her sister Luna got sick and died mid February. Almost immediately afterwards, Tui started to rapidly lose weight. We agonised over what to do. Leave Tui’s death to house sitters? Choose euthanasia as a convenience because we were flying overseas? Tui made the decision for us by stopping eating this week. There’s no coming back from a thin cat stopping eating. So the vet came on Wednesday and we are now a no-cat household, which feels empty. While Tui was even less friendly with strangers than Luna, she loved us and we will miss her head butts, insistent miaows for bacon, and little peeps in the middle of the night when she slunk in an leapt on the bed.

Enough decisions for the time being. I couldn’t even decide what I wanted for breakfast this morning. Time to move into automaton mode, have two sets of clothes to choose between, a very limited palette of food options, and get on my bike and ride.