What is. What was. What could be.
The forgone roads. The missed opportunities. The choices that could have been. The people that slipped away. The wrong words used. The words that weren’t said.
I am often plagued by such nostalgic thoughts, especially as I become older and certain life choices carry with them greater ramifications.
This concept applies to every facet of our lives too: from what we eat for lunch, to what romantic partner we spend our time with at that very moment, to the places we travel. When you’re in New Zealand, it means you’re not in Thailand (but you are in New Zealand, which in the presence of gratitude makes one feel quite wonderful). Choosing one thing is an act of not choosing a thousand other things.
Despair not.
“Each of these lives is the right one. Every path is the right path. Everything could have been anything else, and it would have just as much meaning” — Yoda, Star Wars sage
This can be a liberating realisation. Whatever choice you make is the right choice. You could conceivably spend your life with an array of different people and be just as happy and fulfilled with each unique partner.
It may sound like a cliché but the choice one makes is far less significant than one’s reaction and approach to the choice made. You can make the objectively ‘right’ choice and muck it up with a poor mindset, or make good of a retrospective ‘bad’ choice.
It helps to remember most of our decisions are largely arbitrary because we can never have access to all the relevant information applicable to our choice. Most ‘informed’ choices are educated guesses in the dark.
But something is better than nothing, even if it does bring suffering and despair. Making a decision is better than being a state of paralysis and inertia, thus not making a decision. At the very least that decision is better than a thousand worse alternatives.
Endnote
I try to write just as my thoughts blossom in my mind. I try to be original in what I write, my choice of words, and my interpretations. But is true originality even such a thing? Our thoughts and opinions are merely just a by-product of the culmination of our experiences.
It was Michel de Montaigne who said that original thinking was a form of curation whereby the reader processes the ideas and opinions of others through the prism of their own critical thinking, and then repackages those ideas with their own unique subjective analysis. I think that’s a cool idea.
The Ithaca Diaries
