I left the beach to cross the esplanade and drink my coffee in the Rose Garden, which is more sheltered, and as I turned to look back, I saw the clouds moving and parting, and a brief burst of light came from the gap and shone momentarily on the sea.

I think I finished yesterday saying something about regret, and Geoff Dyer saying that whatever you do, or don’t, there are always regrets. But I part company with him there – I think I’m quite good at avoiding regrets, over the big things, anyway. Of all the major changes I’ve made over the last twelve years, I don’t think there are any which I would undo, were such a thing possible, even the ones whose consequences were painful at the time. Not that that spares me from agonies when I have to make a choice, but that’s another matter. The torments I went through before I decided to move here – which seem ludicrous looking back from this perspective – were only finally settled when I realised that if I didn’t at least try it, I would always wonder what would have happened if I had. And now I know.

I read somewhere – a few years ago now – that it is part of human psychology to see major life choices – marriage, house purchase, choice of job, divorce – in a positive light once they’ve been made and committed to. It’s the ‘it was meant to be…’ syndrome: ‘I was meant to meet you, move here, do that – because look what happened!’ I was saying this a couple of weeks ago, I think, when I talked about fate and fatalism. We know the consequences of those decisions, and can’t really imagine what the alternatives might have been like. Of course, this isn’t universal, and I can’t remember the research and references off the top of my head, but I can see how it has worked out in my life.

In the time before I left my husband, I bought a greeting card with the legend: ‘The only things I’ll regret are the things I don’t do’, and stuck it to the wall behind my computer. It also became the tagline for the new blog I started when I moved out. I’ve still got that card, in fact if I look over my left shoulder, I can see it on a shelf. I think it’s a pretty good motto.

I thought I’d come straight to the computer and start writing, but I fed the cat and let her out, then wondered whether to make coffee, because usually I do my exercise first, and then should I use my espresso pot or the Tassimo, which is quicker but only makes a small cup? And thinking about how I should start, where I should start, about moving here and what it is about the south coast for me, and when did I first go to the New Forest, what is the attraction? And issues around the van, because it’s brought me so much stress and expense down the years, but I have to not think about that, and that’s a split infinitive, but apart from the fact that it’s quite passé to care about split infinitives, it’s important because what I was trying to say there is subtly different from how else it could be said: ‘can’t think’ or ‘mustn’t think’ is different from a choice to ‘not think’ about something, so arguably that two word phrase is a verb in itself, and ‘to not think’ is the infinitive form of that compound verb.

Speaking about ‘choice’, the choice about coffee is a decision in itself, with the factors of speed, flavour and quantity of coffee all having to be taken into account and balanced, and the outcome of that decision (to prioritise speed and use the Tassimo) is that the coffee has already gone and I haven’t finished writing.

Which reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday with the garage man about keeping UHT milk in the van (his suggestion), but once it’s been opened, it only keeps as well as normal milk, so I might as well just take a small bottle of fresh milk with me each time, which is what I do.

This is how my mind works all the time – bouncing from one apparently trivial and meaningless thought to another. I used to assume that it was the same for everybody, but that other people were better than me at cutting through the crap and dealing with it. Now I’m beginning to understand that it goes deeper than that. That’s why the idea of ‘thinking visually’ blew my mind, though I’m now coming to think that that’s probably not as prevalent as I’ve been led to believe – I honestly don’t see how it could be. Thinking is thinking and it’s made up of words and depends on words, and that’s that.

The format of the programme is that they interview people who have made TED talks about whatever the theme is that they’re talking about. One of the contributors yesterday was talking about how ‘hard’ choices are not always ‘big’ choices, and ‘small’ choices are not always ‘easy’. Their definition of a hard choice is where there isn’t a clear distinction between whether one option is better or worse than the other(s) – it may be that they’re all better on some criteria, but not on others. I recognise this problem very well – every day so much of my emotional and mental energy gets sapped by chewing over trivial decisions, because I can’t stop myself going round in circles trying to make comparisons between different factors. When I was a student in the 1970s, the focus was on ‘rational’ decision making, assigning probabilities and utilities to various outcomes and devising models, like cost-benefit analysis, to establish optimal courses of action. I’m glad to see that the field has moved on since then.

Another speaker talked about the importance of ‘committing’ to your choices. If I understand correctly, this is about coming up with a satisfactory explanation for why you made that choice rather than another – satisfactory to yourself, that is. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, but evidently it makes a real difference to the subjects’ later attitude to the choices that they’ve made.

Just writing that now makes me think that there could be huge ramifications from this, in the ways individuals’ beliefs are formed and solidified. For example, what might it say about people who voted for Trump, or Brexit, and then find themselves having to live with the consequences? It also says something to me about the importance of narrative, or story – the stories we tell ourselves. And what about uncertainty? And unintended consequences? Because of course we can’t always predict the outcomes of our choices, or the likelihood of ‘success’ (however that is defined). And never forget the old cliché about ‘for want of a nail…’, or the more modern version, ‘the butterfly effect’ – what did I say a few weeks ago about banal events that turn out to be surprisingly significant, and momentous events that turn out to be surprisingly banal?

Well, this post started out feeling quite trivial, maybe even flippant, but in the writing it has triggered something in my thoughts, both about how my mind works – how I can never settle on a conclusion – and how the world works generally.