Rule of Choosing the Formless

The Rule of Choosing the Formless is a personal principle for making decisions when the way forward is blocked: if a choice lies between something with form and something without it, choose the formless. In a conversation with a frightened woman, the man who devised the rule offers it as hard-won guidance, while her uncertainty about how to recognize either option leaves its meaning open to the judgment that a future choice will require.

Origin and Formulation

The rule is introduced with a qualification rather than a claim to authority. The man says he is in no position to give advice, but that he follows a rule whenever he does not know what to do. He frames it as a practical response to reaching a wall: even when following it makes the immediate path difficult, he says, it has always worked out.

Asked whether he invented the principle himself, he says that he did, drawing on his own experience. The rule therefore arrives as an individual method rather than an inherited maxim or an abstract system. Its compressed wording makes a sharp distinction between things that have form and things that do not, but the conversation supplies no fixed definition of either category.

The Conversation and Its Stakes

The principle is offered while the woman is afraid. She says that at times her fear is so strong that she cannot think. A blue minivan pulls into the space beside them, and an unhappy middle-aged couple gets out, arguing over something described as pointless. After they leave, silence returns; the woman’s eyes are closed. Against this brief interruption and renewed quiet, the man offers the rule without claiming he can solve her immediate uncertainty for her.

The woman repeats the advice back to him, using the formulation that one should choose the option without form. Repetition shows that she has heard and retained the words, but it does not mean she knows how to apply them. She says that, if required to make such a choice right then, she does not know whether she could tell the difference between what has form and what does not. The obstacle is thus not simply fear or indecision: the rule itself depends on a distinction she cannot yet identify.

Application and Significance

The man does not resolve that uncertainty with a definition. Instead, he tells her that somewhere down the line she will be faced with that kind of choice. The guidance is prospective: it does not dictate a concrete decision in the present conversation, but gives her a principle to recall when an impasse arises later. Its force rests on his assertion that experience has made the rule reliable for him, not on any explanation of what the formless must mean in every situation.

When she asks how he can know that such a choice is coming, he nods quietly and jokes that, as an experienced gay man, he has all kinds of special powers. The humor softens the exchange without supplying further certainty. The rule remains both memorable and indeterminate: the man can state what he believes one should choose, while the woman—and the reader—is left to recognize the difference when the choice finally presents itself.