Up in the air

When a plan or decision is up in the air it has not be finalized yet. Quite often leaving things up in the air creates frustration.

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Idiom: Up in the air

Decisions, decisions, decisions we all have to make; some are harder than others, and most of them are up in the air.

What can we do about it?

Making decisions is like death and taxes: inevitable.

One of the main challenges with making decisions is the knock-on effect.

Our decision affects all of the other choices we make later.

This causes us to delay the decision-making process, and everything remains up in the air.


What I mean is that everything is uncertain because others can’t make their decisions until after we make ours.


When a decision is delayed or put off, all the other choices remain undecided too.

In a business sense, unmade decisions commonly lead to project delays and cost overruns.

This is where white elephants and boondoggles are born.

Here’s a perfect example for you.

An article in the National Post, a Canadian newspaper, discusses the need to find a replacement for the handguns used by the Canadian military.

Right now, the handgun they use is 74 years old.

Think about that.

The Canadian military currently uses the same gun they used in the Second World War.

Canadian police, on the other hand, use modern weapons.

You’d think this would be a high-priority decision.

Canadian troops take a 74-year-old weapon into combat that jams or stops working once every 62 shots.

It’s not dependable.

Although the government has been working on it since 2016, everything is still up in the air.

It seems that the military will not be given the green light to replace the guns until at least 2026.

That’s what is called red tape.

Think about it.

Isn’t it ridiculous?

Drug dealers have more modern weapons than the Canadian military.

Perhaps the military should begin recruiting baseball pitchers who can accurately throw a gun at an enemy when they can’t shoot at them.

The handgun debacle is a perfect example of a failure to make a decision causing all other choices to be up in the air.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).  

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 64.  

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.