The Flu Shot: Should I or Shouldn't I?

I'll start off by saying that this article isn’t really about the flu shot at all, per se - it's actually about making decisions. What brought his topic to mind, though, is that I’ve recently decided to forego the shot this year and go the natural health route instead.

Is this because I know better than those who advocate the vaccination? No. Might I end up regretting not getting the shot? Maybe. I don’t know.

And it’s precisely because I don’t know that I had to make that decision with my gut. This doesn’t mean that my gut is necessarily right – but because of the vast array of conflicting opinions and information to be found on the topic, my head simply wasn’t able to make the choice.

But, again, this isn’t just about the flu shot – it’s about all of the personal decisions we need to make in our continuous striving for growth and wholeness. Ideally, we can search for the information we need, find it, and make a decision based on what we’ve just learned (assuming that it’s accurate). Unfortunately, though, there are a lot of things that just don’t work that way. And so we have to make a decision based on other things and hope for the best.

We all do the best with what we’ve got at any given point, and we can never predict with 100% accuracy how things are going to turn out. All of our decisions are based upon some combination of past experience, hard data and hearsay, intuition and faith. Sometimes we’re guided by our values and beliefs, and at other times we feel safer playing the odds. In any case, decisions have to be made.

But it’s important to understand the difference between the decisions that are irresponsibly founded on intuition (where if we actually cared to do the work, we could come up with something more informed), and the decisions that need to be made when intuition is truly all we’ve got.

It takes a lot of discipline, patience, and critical thought to thoroughly examine and investigate our options and the potential implications of our choices – to do our due diligence. But it’s an important endeavour: many people too often get lazy with this and act mindlessly and impulsively; sometimes with serious consequences. And many of us also tend to take it too far the other way: we over-think our lives and ultimately succumb to overwhelm and ‘analysis paralysis’ – never taking the risks that can lead to great rewards.

So let’s always remember to be thoughtful with our choices, and take care in our actions. And when we do feel stuck, fearful, or confused after an honest assessment, let’s learn to trust that things often turn out okay anyway – and that we can handle the unanticipated variables with grace and resilience.