A Difficult Choice

I remember that as a child , I didn 't have difficulty making choices . My first vivid memory of a situation where I clearly had to make a conscious decision , something which was imprinted in my mind forever came with a visit to a toy store at a mall . Familiar with the phrase like a child in a candy store ? It was the same thing- but obviously with toys in all shapes and sizes some were mechanically animated with blinking lights , amusing music and sounds and moving parts . You would have expected a child

of about 4 (I think I was four or five ) to have simply sat there and insisted on living in the store if mom and dad didn 't buy everything in sight for them to take home

But things didn 't turn that way . I did spend a substantial amount of time browsing through the shelves , holding this , admiring that and generally wishing we could buy everything I wanted and fretting a little bit like any typical four-year old . But in the end , I knew what I really wanted from among the bewildering array of choices . It was a choice that had been made with a combination of facts (I saw an ad on television common sense (I knew it was a toy my other siblings wouldn 't be so interested in , and most importantly , it was an object that I was happiest with

The toy by the way was a Lego set- I was four and I was in a building phase plus the fact that the Lego pieces were nice to chew on when no one was watching . As years passed by and the Lego was replaced with various other toys , contraptions and amusements , choosing became more complicated and even tedious . Could it be possible that a four-year old be more adept and actually be more matured ' in making decisions and choices than a fifth-grader who was actually already taking high-school level Algebra , or an eighth-grader who suddenly showed an aptitude for music and was playing the piano like a pro

For some reason , that incident at the toy store became nothing more than a memory . The older I got , the more I got confused and distracted even as my intellect had grown by leaps and bounds . In fifth-grade , I was the school nerd who took high-school Algebra lessons for the fun of it . But when it came to making choices about summer-camp , or something as trivial as what type of breakfast cereal to eat , I was a wreck an annoying , back-tracking , undecided 11-year old . In eighth-grade , I could read sheet music as if they were comic books . But I caused my father agony when I hemmed and hawed at what high-school to go to special music high school , regular high school ? - I couldn 't make up my mind . My mother told me to my face quite bluntly you 're a genius at a lot of things , but it 's sad that you can...