The choice tends to arrive already formed. Take the job or stay put. Confront the colleague or let it go. Raise the money or build it slowly out of revenue. Two options, set out cleanly, and the whole weight of your attention goes into weighing one against the other. You list what each would cost, sleep on it, put it to someone you trust, and eventually decide. Somewhere in that sequence one question almost never gets asked: where did these two come from, and what else was in the room when they were drawn up?
Most decisions are made well inside a frame nobody examined. The reasoning can be excellent and the field of play still be a quick sketch, drawn in a hurry.
The private forks are the ones that matter most, and nobody handed them over at all. Stay in the marriage or end it. Keep the business going another year or shut it. Say the thing at last or swallow it again. Those pairs get built in your own head, out of the two answers easiest to picture, and are then carried around for months as though they were the complete set of what the situation allows.
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