Midnight Musings: Thoughts About "The Road Not Taken..."

Life is filled with choices.

Every day, we are presented with an endless string of choices, whether they are major — like breaking off a relationship or quitting a job — or minor, like what sort of coffee we're going to order.

With every choice we make, there is also a choice (or choices) we don't make. And sometimes the choices not made revisit us in our minds and in our dreams. Of course, some people are more prone to such reflections than others... if you have spent a lot of time with self-development and developing consciousness, those thoughts tend to be more frequent.

"Choices have consequences!"

It was one of the lessons hammered into my head when I was a kid... but what I was not taught is that one of the consequences of making a choice is that there is usually "something foregone," as part of the process.

All Things Considered...

Sometimes I consider the choice I made when I decided to move from Europe to the USA for University, back in 1981. It's one of those "major changes of direction" we can take in life... that without a doubt will have a direct impact on the rest of our life.

I think about it... I could have gone to the University of Copenhagen, or possibly even Oxford or Cambridge. My choice to go all the way to the USA had little to do with education, and a lot to do with wanting to put a lot of distance between myself and a very controlling and domineering family.

I definitely got what I wanted — distance — but it wasn't necessarily a choice that made me happy.

In truth, University didn't make me happy... it wasn't something I went in for because I wanted it, it was something I did because "it was expected of me."

All other things being equal, I would likely have tried to move to Seattle (ironically, I now live a relatively short drive from there!) to become a writer. Or maybe an artist. Both things that were considered "totally unacceptable" professions, around where I grew up.

But I ended up in Texas and made another choice to get married, primarily so I could stay in the US and not have to return to Europe.

Which led me to the choice of getting involved in a fledgling small business with a college buddy of mine, rather than "going to work for a company."

Another road not taken... a road that steered me in the direction of pretty much never working towards having a career... and instead just working "gigs" and "jobs" all my life. How might my life have been, had I taken the other path?

Of course, we can speculate on these things till we're blue in the face... and ultimately it changes nothing; we are where we are... and we are who we are because of the choices that brought us to precisely this point.

And that's really OK.

It is said that we should strive to live our lives in such a way that we have no regrets when we are at death's door... but I wonder whether anybody is able to truly make such a claim.

I suppose it might be a matter of semantics... "having regrets" is perhaps not the same thing as speculating on "what might have happened IF..."

Do I have regrets? Maybe that's not the right way of phrasing it... but in retrospect, it does seem like the choices made weren't necessarily the ones that brought the most desirable outcome.

Thanks for reading, and have a great remainder of your weekend!

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Created at 2023-01-14 23:55 PST
0720/1975