“Often, if there’s something that I want to do, but somehow can’t get myself to do, it’s because I don’t have clarity. This lack of clarity often arises from a feeling of ambivalence – I want to do something, but I don’t want to do it; or I want one thing, but I also want something else that conflicts with it.”

Gretchen Rubin

‘I don’t know’, ‘I don’t mind’, ‘I’m easy either way’, ‘I’m happy to go with the flow’.

All statements that come out of our mouths accompanied by a faint sense of guilt. Somehow society has conditioned us to have clear and definitive opinions about stuff. Not holding such clarity often means we’re accused of being a ‘fence-sitter’, ‘indecisive’ or ‘dithering’. As if they’re necessarily bad things.

Which, of course, they sometimes are. That’s because there are two very different ways by which we can be ambivalent about a situation. Both can be seen vividly in our ‘new’ kitchen. Where, somehow, we managed to spend just over a year not making a decision about what tiles to put up.

I’m the lead ‘negative ambivalence’ part of the kitchen tile story. I can’t make my mind up because I’m too apathetic to stir my brain into action to contemplate any of the alternatives on offer. The landslide of samples that have been and gone over the last twelve months have been a mere rainbow-coloured blur in my mind, because frankly I don’t care what colour(s) the tiles end up being. Pale-burgundy is much the same as duck-egg-blue in my head, tile-wise.

The positive side of the ambivalence story is that the pale-burgundy-duck-egg-blue debate has, until very recently, still been ongoing because there’s a dilemma that needs solving. In this positive side of the story, the ambivalence has been useful incubation time for playing out the consequences of the two-sides of the dilemma, and filling in the  knowledge gaps. And, moreover, done in such a manner that I’m now confident that we have ended up with a solution in which the dilemma has well and truly been transcended. It is the ‘right’ solution.

Proactive ambivalence is about recognizing the presence of a conflict – there are advantages on both sides of the fence – and proactively working out how the conflict can be resolved without making a trade-off.

Take me outside the kitchen and thinking about music, and I’m much more inclined towards this kind of proactive ambivalence. Example. Paul Simon and Sting are touring the UK together at the moment. Should I go and see them? I’m not sure:

I think Paul Simon is one of the greatest songwriters that’s ever lived, but, I don’t think he’s a great live act. Conversely, I think of Sting as a pompous, moralistic egotist, but (damn him) that he also possesses a genius-level kind of leadership and feel when it comes to getting the most out of musicians on stage. So does the combination of the two of them equate to the best of either worlds, or the worst? Either way, though, in all likelihood, they’ll never tour together again, so whatever happens it will be ‘unique’. Couple all that with the more practical issue of the (near-stratospheric) price of the tickets and the fact that I’ll spend seven hours in the car getting to and from the gig, and there’s an awful lot to be proactively ambivalent about:

I’m fortunate here to have a whole toolset designed to help transcend these kinds of conflict and contradiction, but even with all of them at my disposal, the solution process can still take time. In the large majority of cases, the non-emergence of a solution is indicative of the fact that there is still some important missing information. Part of the proactive ambivalence, in this situation becomes working out what’s missing and then finding it. How could I find out whether the Simon/Sting combination is good or bad? Check out the reviews.How could I avoid having to spend seven hours in the car? Find a client or clients in the same city the morning after the gig? How could I avoid having to take out a second mortgage to fund the ticket? Look for cut-price auctions on the ticket resale websites.

Proactive ambivalence. The Boy In The Bubble, seeks Message In A Bottle, finds bottle, transcends bubble, agrees the duck-egg-blue kitchen tiles look great. All is well with the world.