She had reached for measurement the way she always did, which was immediately. She was an analyst; she trusted numbers more than feelings and she had good reasons for this, professionally, and probably bad reasons too that she had not examined. When it became clear she needed to decide about the city, she had started a spreadsheet. Day 1 of 334.
The categories: certainty about leaving (percentage), certainty about staying (percentage), undecided reserve (remainder). Each day she updated the numbers based on nothing she could precisely define, but she had been doing this long enough to trust her own calibration. The column for leaving had climbed from 12% to 61% over the course of nearly a year. The column for staying had declined from 41% to 19%. The undecided reserve was at 20%.
She had set a threshold of 80% before she would act. She was nineteen points away. At the current rate of accumulation she would hit the threshold in approximately sixty days.
She had always assumed this was a reasonable way to proceed. She was a careful person and certainty mattered and you should wait until you had enough.
On Day 334 she added a row she had not included before: total certainty reserve across all active questions. She pulled from her other sheets: her job (73%, stable for three years). Her friendships in the city, whether to maintain them at current depth or let them recede (44%, declining). Her relationship with her sister, which had become complicated (38%, declining sharply). Her general sense of which direction her life was facing (29%).
The total available certainty reserve, across all questions, had declined by approximately thirty-one points since Day 1.
She looked at this for a long time. The leaving column had gained forty-nine points. The total reserve had lost thirty-one. She did not know if this was a coincidence or if the certainty had been moving from somewhere into the spreadsheet, being spent by the daily act of measuring it, consumed by the attention she was paying to the question of whether to leave.
She closed the spreadsheet without entering today's numbers.
She sat with that for a while.