A Bear In A Bottle Shop

"Every choice is so important..." the Bear thought, as he approached the large Build-Your-Own Six-Pack cooler in his neighborhood bottle shop. 

The air felt crisp and fragrant when the bear woke that morning. Hinting, teasing, at the possibility that outside crisp leaves were littered all over the ground, ready and waiting to be crunched under paws. A little treat from the world to its tenants.

The Bear stood in front of the cooler holding an empty six-pack. He looked down at the six empty slots. Six empty slots to fill. One, two, three, four, five, six. There were a lot of choices for only six slots. 100's, if not 1000’s of choices it seemed, all for only six empty slots. 

"Every choice is so important..." The bear thought again. 

The bear started to scan the beer cooler. So many words and so many descriptors of so many different beers. Coffee, pumpkin, marzen, festbier, jalapeño, juicy, hazy, coconut, sour, vanilla, blueberry, lactose... The bear didn't know what to do. He didn't even know where to start. Just so many choices, how could there be so many choices?

And of course, one choice leads to another and then another and then another. You keep making choices and then all your choices stack up on top of each other and then all those choices stack up some more and then before you know it one choice has led you all the way out to the edge of the universe...

What to do, what to do?

The bear started coming up with combinations of beers he could pull from the cooler and he was off. It almost felt like each choice he contemplated, each combination he made, propelled him to float higher and higher, off the ground, escaping the earth’s atmosphere. Each choice now fueling speeds faster and faster and faster propelling him further and further and further into outer space, into the universe, approaching the edge, getting closer and closer to the end. 

Then you make another choice and another choice and another choice and you’re so far away from where you even started that you’re not sure you can ever get back. You’ve made it to the edge of the universe. And there are still more choices to make. You’ll only ever end up here yet still — 

“Great Googlie-Mooglie would you look at all those beers!”

A slug must have entered the shop at some point while the Bear was flying through the cosmos. The bluntness of the comment piercing the Bear’s journey and bringing him crashing back to earth.

“Whatever happened to just a beer? A regular old no frilly stuff, beer?” The slug turned to leave. “Come on, they got blueberry beer now? Blueberry? It's all gone to hell.”

“They still have what you want,” The bear thought as the slug made his way to the more traditional domestic beers section of the bottle shop. “More choices aren’t the worst thing in the world.”

The bear turned back to the beer cooler, he took a deep measured breath and proceeded to make the 6 most important decisions he could ever make.