SIMON WALKER: Big decisions, choice mate

Decisions. We all get to make them. Some more hardcore than others. About life. About death. About whether to get chips or cashews or beer before tuning into the tennis.

That can be a tough one post-Christmas when chips and cashews and beer are off the detox list.

In the end, most people will tell you to go with your heart. Your cholesterol clogged, pulmonary challenged, triple by-pass candidate of a heart. And get the lot.

Because life goes on, and whether you get decisions right or wrong, time usually tells. Or your waistline.

Of course you could be a linesman at a soccer game and never make the right call, ever (ask Graham Arnold).

Or a video ref in any professional sport. As any punter will tell you, there are shades of grey to every decision, but the video ref's function is to make you go grey.

What coulda, woulda, shoulda been; sliding doors; butterfly effects; que sera sera, whatever will be, will be - they're all ways of rationalising the decision-making process and/or outcome.

And as a great video ref once said, "It sucks to have options." But if we didn't, you wouldn't have the glorious anguish associated with making a call.

(Some of which can be way tougher than choosing between chips, cashews or beer.)

And with that, we send a big shout-out to all those kiddies considering uni offers. It might seem life and death at the moment, but rest assured, it's even more serious if you have to listen to their ponderings.

But it's natural when you work hard to make your own luck, all cliches being equal in a world where we're all supposedly created as such, despite constant evidence to the contrary, that we will struggle with decision-making anguish.

The best that you can do at these critical junctures is weigh up the options, go over the pros and cons and arrive at the logical choice - which is to panic a bit, swear a lot, and lose some sleep. Welcome to life.

There is a school of thought that goes "some of the best decisions you ever make are your worst".

And it's true. How often do you hear people say they could have gone one way in life but went the other and by a whole raft of random coincidences they ended up making the decision that in retrospect defined their life.

It's pretty much the story of video reffing.

Not to mention relationships.

And, of course, regret - the flipside to all great decisions and the reason we often worry so much.

Enter Edith Piaf. Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

Translated: 'No, I regret nothing', except maybe singing like Edith Piaf after making a decision I will never admit I regret because of Edith and her whiney, defiant, Gallic, bloody-minded vicious circle of optimism.

It's a counter-intuitive viewpoint that at its core suggests nothing really matters in the end (even if at the time you suspect it does).

A Ned Kelly "such is life" perspective is surely under serious examination by Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran as they ponder an Indonesian firing squad.

At one moment it must have seemed like a good idea to strap drugs to their body and fly into a country that positively boasts you will be executed if caught.

But of course you can never be sure.

Until they're stripping the glad wrap off your person in the full glare of international TV and our Prime Minister is making timid noises about respecting national sovereignty.

Time to spark up Edith.

Sometimes at the moment of truth, when a big decision must be made, it pays to remember the Marines.

Any marine will tell you it's the ability to move forward under fire that matters. Even though that move may get you killed. You must act. The worst thing a marine can do is nothing. That's why they're so scary.

If, on the other hand, you are not a marine, but have to choose which uni to go to, you must still act, like you know what you're doing. Chances are when you look back at things, it will appear that you did.

Which gets us to that unfortunate Dutch guy who tweeted a pic of himself before taking off on the doomed Malaysia Airlines flight over the Ukraine "in case it disappeared". When the plane disappeared it didn't look like such a good decision to get on it. Nor tweet that pic.

People say things happen for a reason and with the benefit of hindsight experts have been able to say the reason why his plane disappeared was less likely to do with "the cosmos" and more to do with Russian separatists. Or Ukrainian nationalists.

Neither of which were mentioned by the travel agent when he bought the ticket.

The moral of the story being you can never really know for certain if you are making the right decision.

You just have to move forward and put doubts behind.

If you can see a rainbow ahead on that river you're up (without a paddle) that isn't being created by Niagara Falls, then things hopefully should be OK.

Ultimately it's important to remember that you aren't playing for sheep stations.

If you were, making decisions would be that much easier.

You'd just follow the sheep.