Like many of you, I have an in-box and an out-box on my desk at work. But actually the in-box functions as more of a procrastination box. Anything and everything winds up there. Right now there’s a set of x-rays for a molar that needs a root canal, a notice for jury duty, and an un-read sermon that a colleague in Texas sent out via email last fall that seemed too interesting to throw-away but not quite compelling enough to make me read it. I’ll get around to the sermon someday or toss it. Which is the real purpose of the procrastination box, to serve as a way station to the trash can. When I can’t figure out what to do with a given piece of paper, it goes into a holding pattern, in hopes that the burden of making a decision will go eventually go away.

Because making a decision is a burden, or can be. That’s what makes growing up such a stressful passage for so many young people on the verge of adulthood. Right now my son Noah is receiving two or three recruitment letters from colleges every day. He’s been courted by schools ranging from Oral Roberts to the Ivy League. And he’s been studying the entries in the big guide to universities I bought him, which includes over seven hundred listings, just a fraction of the more than three-thousand accredited institutions of higher learning in the United States. That’s a lot to choose from. And if there’s one school out there that’s the best choice, the optimal learning environment for your particular set of aptitudes, that means there is a very high probability that you’re going to make the wrong choice and end up in one of those other 2,999 colleges that are sub-optimal. The odds of finding the perfect match are small, and the pressure to get it right can be enormous. And deciding whether and where to go to college is just one of the decisions that young adults face. They’re also choosing life partners, and deciding about their career path, and trying to figure out their own religious beliefs, as distinct from the views of their parents. It’s no wonder growing up feels so overwhelming to a majority of young people.

And for older folks like me, there’s a whole other set of prickly decisions. T.S. Eliot’s literary alter ego J. Alfred Prufrock dithers and complains the older he gets, wondering, "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?," a man confronted with dwindling options but still consumed with angst over making the most minute choices, giving the poem its echoing refrain, "In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." Sometimes the choices I make are truly inconsequential, like whether to take a nap after dinner or just go to bed early. But that doesn’t free me from the chore of making up my mind.

People usually equate having more choices with having more freedom, which is supposed to be an unqualified good. Expanding the menu of possibilities means more opportunities to express our personal likes and dislikes, and that ought to make us happy. But it doesn’t always work that way. That came as a revelation to Barry Schwartz, when he walked into the Gap a few years ago to buy a pair of jeans. He says, "I tend to wear my jeans until they’re falling apart, so it had been quite a while since my last purchase. A nice salesperson walked up to me and asked if she could help."

"I want a pair of jeans--32-28," I said. "Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?" she replied. "Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you wan them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?"

"I was stunned, Schwartz says. "A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, "I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind." It turned out she didn’t know, but after consulting one of her older colleagues, she was able to figure out what "regular jeans used to be, and she pointed me in the right direction.

Schwartz is the author of The Paradox of Choice, a recent book which claims that having too many choices can actually tyrannize our lives. Who has a whole afternoon to spend, he asks, trying on sixteen different kinds of pants? He does have a point. Even the most finicky eater probably doesn’t need a hundred and seventy-five different kinds of salad dressing on the supermarket shelf. When Henry Ford invented the Model-T, he said that people could buy the car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black, and when I was growing up, there was just one phone company to choose from, and no one ever called during dinner to try to sell you a new long distance plan. Whether you look at entertainment options, or the number of mutual funds on Wall Street, or the varieties of cappuccino and mocha latte that caffeine addicts can now choose from in addition to plain old coffee, the number of choices that Americans enjoy has expanded exponentially, but it’s not at all clear that people are any happier than they were a generation or two ago. Indeed, most surveys show just the opposite.

Sometimes people think they want choices, when actually they’d rather have someone else making the decisions for them. That seems to be the case with health care, for instance. Ask people how they’d want their medical treatment to be handled in the hypothetical case that they were diagnosed with cancer, and a majority will say they would want to take full charge for making their own health care decisions. Ask people who have actually been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness what they want, and a majority would rather relinquish at least a little of their independence and put themselves in the hands of a caring and competent physician. This is a natural reaction, perhaps. Faced with a difficult dilemma whether to undergo chemo or let an ailment take its course, many would rather make no decision than risk making the wrong decision. And part of the reason we end up with unfortunate situations like Terry Schaivo’s is that some would rather trust in God or blind chance than face the hard task of actually thinking through the alternatives required to fill out a living will.

Having choices is a mixed blessing at best, and this does present a challenge for religious liberals, who have always put a premium on personal autonomy and self-determination. The title of one popular introduction to Unitarian Universalism is Our Chosen Faith, suggesting that we can select our own belief systems here, and may elect to be humanist or Christian or practice Buddhism if we please. And it’s true there are very few external restraints to limit our religious preferences in a congregation like this one. But there are, of course, internal constraints on all of us. Barry Schwartz, for example, helped to found a Reform Jewish temple in his home town; he remarks that he didn’t really have a choice about being a Jew. Mormonism was just not an option for him. And when it comes to our own deepest convictions and intuitions about life, I doubt if we have complete choice, either. Sometimes it seems as if our beliefs choose us, rather than vice versa. They’re an outgrowth of our inner nature. Some of us may be born skeptics, others mystics, the way some of us have an inborn tendency to gravitate toward art or science. Yet none of us are born Rembrandts or Einsteins. Natural talent takes you only so far, at which point hard work and determination have to take over. Barry Schwartz, for example, may have been born a Jew, but being a good Jew required making a decision about what to do with that inherited endowment. Character is about the choices we do make: how to play the hand that we’ve been dealt.

Managing choices intelligently rather than feeling beleaguered by them is of the utmost importance, therefore. And there are proven strategies to help simplify the task of daily decision-making, so that we can make more smart choices (or at least fewer dumb ones). One of the most obvious and basic skills is the cultivation of good habits. Over a hundred years ago, the psychologist William James observed that "there is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day , and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, or matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exit for his consciousness at all." James advised that "the more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work." The philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, was so regular in his habits that citizens of Konigsberg reportedly set their watches by his morning strolls; having a routine, presumably, freed his attention to focus on weightier matters. And the rule is the same whether you aim to become a philosopher or excel in any other area of life. If you want to become a writer, your writing has to become habitual. If you want to be a musician, practicing the scales needs to become a daily discipline. And if your aim is to become a more spiritual person–better balanced, more serene–then you might want to consider building some healthy spiritual habits into your week, whether that means regular attendance at worship or participating in a twelve-step group or taking time to sit down with your family for dinner each evening. Establishing a good habit is like saving money; the expenditure of effort might seem like a big investment initially, but the dividends pay off down the road.

That’s the first rule for decision-making, and the second is to remember that when it comes to making choices, the best is often the enemy of the good. Many of you might recall Carol Maurer, a long time member of this congregation who died not long ago. At Carol’s memorial, her daughter said that her mom was on a lifelong quest for the perfect handbag. The bag she was looking for was neither too big nor too small, and had enough pockets and zippers but not too many. Though she spent countless hours in department stores, often taking stuff out of her purse and putting it into the one she was looking at to see how it all fit, Carol never did find the exactly bag she wanted, which means she was never totally satisfied with the bag she had. That’s not a serious character flaw if you’re shopping for a purse, but if you’re in the market for a mate, it can lead to frustration. One minister shocked his congregation in this regard by suggesting in a sermon on marriage that the grass is always greener. There will always be someone, somewhere, who’s smarter, funnier, sexier, and probably more politically correct than the individual you happened to marry. But imagining that having a happy marriage means finding that ideal person is a recipe for calamity. At some point, around the time you take your wedding vows, you need to stop shopping. And as for that perfect handbag, or whatever else it is you’re pining for that you think will make your life complete, there is a grain of wisdom in the sales line from "Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery" in the little town of Lake Woebegon ... if you can’t find it here, you can probably get along without it.

More isn’t always better. Most of us recognize that simple truth, except when it comes to having choices. Choices sometimes liberate, but multiplied without limit they can stultify our minds. And the strange thing is that sometimes we are most content when we have no choice, like a sky that never asks whether to be blue or some other color.