Set It Down for an Hour

What if nothing falls apart when you stop deciding for a little while?

Tiny cups of soup. Local art on every wall. Two people I’ve been coming here with for years, one retired now, one no longer a coworker. The org chart dissolved. We still show up together.

I was looking at a piece made of computer keys when my brain offered its verdict:

I could do that.

Ya’ll. 🙄

I couldn’t do that. I definitely couldn’t. But that’s not the point.

The point is that my brain wasn’t letting me just look. It had to assess. It had to render a verdict.

That’s the tax. The decider’s tax. You can’t just experience something. You have to process it first.

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For the deciders, the over-functioners, and the ones learning to receive.

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I caught myself mid-assessment. And something softened.

I went back to the computer keys. Looked again. And this time I saw it: a face, made from the arrangement of the keys. A subtle shadow. The whole piece shifted. It had been there the whole time, but I couldn’t see it while the machine was running.

The ceramics came next.

I probably wouldn’t have even looked at them. I was there for art. ART and soup. Duhhhhh. Ceramics are functional. Bowls are bowls. Vases are vases. It’s not art, bowls, and soup.

My pre-filtered brain had already sorted them into a category that didn’t require my attention.

But then the vendor called to me and invited me over. Something human in me said - yes. I let the filter go.

And suddenly the bowls were beautiful. The glazes. The weight of them. The way light literally danced across the surfaces. Seriously. Look at the picture. The glaze is mesmerizing.

I walked out with quite a few ceramic pieces. BECAUSE LOOK AT THAT BOWL.

Luis wants to keep fruit in there. Ugh. I want to make bread in it. Sigh…

And the soup… I swear the soup got better too. Same soup. Same event. But I could actually taste it once I stopped running the machine.

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I make a lot decisions for a living.

All day. The best available choice with the least available information. And I’m good at it. I’ve built a reputation on it. People look to me for it.

And it bleeds into everything. The restaurant, the art benefit, the grocery store. The decider doesn’t take days off. It just keeps running, sorting the world into categories, rendering verdicts, establishing positions.

It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to name because it feels like me. It feels like personality. But it’s a role. A function. A thing I do, not a thing I am.

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Luis and I went to Urban Hill for my early birthday. I wrote about it last week: the Polaroid, the framed photo, the sparkler I didn’t expect.

What I didn’t realize? I didn’t decide anything. The cake. The camera. The moment worth marking. Someone else had already built the infrastructure before I walked in.

All I had to do was receive it.

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Two moments. Same discovery.

At Art and Soup, I set the mantle down myself. Caught the machine running, and chose to let it go. And suddenly I could see the face in the keys. The beauty in the bowls. The actual taste of the soup.

At Urban Hill, someone else had already made the decisions for me. The infrastructure was built. The decider wasn’t needed. I just walked into a space where receiving was the only job.

Either way, the relief was the same.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: nothing collapsed.

My job didn’t crumble while I was eating soup. Decisions didn’t pile up and crush me because I took an afternoon off from making them. The mantle waited. Oh, it was certainly patient. It was still there when I got back. 🙂

We act like the decider has to run constantly, or something will fall apart. Like the muscle will atrophy if we rest it.

But I looked at art without assessing it, and I still know how to assess things. I received a birthday without planning it, and I still know how to plan. The capacity doesn’t disappear because you set it down.

The mantle is more patient than we give it credit for.

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The Polaroid is on a shelf in my house now. A ceramic bowl from Art and Soup sits on my kitchen counter.

Evidence that I was there. That I was happy. That I let the machine stop running long enough to actually see what was in front of me.

Here. This is what you looked like when you weren’t deciding anything.

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The Department of Aliveness offers you a Permit:

Set it down for an hour.

The mantle will wait. The decisions will be there. Your competence won’t evaporate because you stopped performing it for a lunch, an afternoon, a single art benefit where you let yourself just look at things without rendering a verdict.

You can pick it back up whenever you’re ready. It’s not going anywhere.

And you might find (I did) that the soup tastes better. The art reveals itself. The birthday lands differently.

Not because you earned the relief. But because you let yourself have it.

-Alex 🧡

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If you know someone who hasn’t stopped deciding in a while, please pass this along.

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About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell, PhD — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and the founder of a made-up institution called The Department of Aliveness.

By day I’m a VP leading global research on what makes people come alive at work. I love it. By every other random hour I’m here — writing, facilitating, and walking beside people who are figuring out what it means to be alive after everything shifted.

I’ve been homeless. I’ve been divorced. I’ve had my brain rewired by a semi-truck and my life rearranged by things I didn’t choose. I’ve also been surprised by how much aliveness was waiting in the wreckage — not because suffering is a gift, but because I stopped waiting to be healed before I started paying attention.

I’m on a mission to remind one person a day that the life they’re living is the one that counts.

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I’d love for you to join me on this journey of aliveness. Join the department today!