Like a million little doorways
All the choices we made
All the stages we passed through
All the roles we played
For so many different directions
Our separate paths might have turned
With every door that we opened
Every bridge that we burned.
There are choices I have made in my life that I wish had turned out differently. There are things I regret of course, stupid things I did that I wish I could take back, but those aren't the choices I'm thinking about this rainy morning. I'm thinking about the legitimate, honest choices that we make, perfectly reasonable or viable, but that do close doors and let other opportunities slip by. As I sit in my chair in the living room of the house I grew up in, watching the rain and wind play in the branches of the trees I used to climb up in to think when I was little, I'm pondering those opportunities I missed. I'm wondering if there was something I should have done differently, if one of those decisions that was a mistake.
But honestly, each of those decisions was the right one at the time. The right decision for who I was and what I needed. What else could I have done? As I search through my memory for which decision it was that I should regret, I come up blank. I either wasn't ready or didn't want those opportunities when I had the chance: I made those decisions for a reason. If you put me back in the same situation feeling the same way, I'd probably make the same decision all over again. In the book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aslan tells Lucy that he never tells anyone what would have happened "if." What would have happened if...I had gone on a mission? I had gone to a different college? I had never dated that one boy four years ago? What if I'd never broken up with that one boy six years ago? What would have happened if I had quit teaching after my first year and gone to Japan? What if I hadn't hung up before the phone was answered that one time three years ago? What if I'd been a music teacher instead of English? What if I'd stayed in Blackfoot instead of leaving? What if? All pointless questions. The truth is I wouldn't take it back. The only real regrets I have are that I wish I had known myself better at some of those junctures so that I wouldn't have had to learn so many lessons the hard way. But I needed those experiences.
So there's nothing I'd change, no decision I'd reverse, but listening to the damp wind blow through the pines I still wonder, what if? What should I have changed? There was and is no way to get all the experiences I had, plus all the experiences and opportunities I missed. That's just not how life works. We make decisions, we gain some things, lose others. But this quiet morning, in a house in a town both filled with the accumulated memories of my life, I wish I could reach back across those years and take a few of those lost things with me. It's impossible. But it's a good morning for what if.
Like a million little crossroads
Through the backstreets of youth
Each time we turn a new corner
A tiny moment of truth
For so many different connections
Our separate paths might have made
With every door that we opened
Every game we played.
("Ghost of a Chance." Rush.)
6 comments:
So are you saying you have regrets or are you saying you don't have regrets?
Funny, I had those same conversations with myself when I was home this spring. I sat in a chair of the living room and wondered.
The 'what if' game gets harder with age, but i made a decision long ago to simply not play it. That way lies rump of skunk and madness! (this quote comes from an awesome short story i read in college entitled "Thus we Frustrate Charlemagne" about time travelers who try to fix the past, and instead manage to unravel history until they are standing next to a man in a mask by a bonfire uttering "that way lies rump of skunk and madness!" to the question of "what shall we change next?")
Rather, try making the most of the choices you do take, and seeing them through to their natural conclusions. Should you find yourself wondering 'what if' use that reflection as a learning experience, not a session for regret.
Finally, learn to laugh at your stupider choices, life in general, and all manner of silly outcomes you couldn't have possibly predicted, and you will feel much, much better when life goes bonkers on you. Because it will.
Life gives you choices to make. You go for it. It might be wrong, but that's OK. It's a learning experience. Not everything is going to turn out perfect. You can try to make it perfect, but it won't work. What I do is I pretend it's perfect. Look on the bright side. It makes you a lot happier.
~Sandee Beech :)
I've been thinking lately about how many things are defining in our life that are completely out of our control. What order you are in your family, and the personalities of the siblings around you. What your parents do for a living, where they choose to live, pretty much everything with them. Health problems, natural disasters, people that are in your life because you both happened to be at the same place at the same time. So much of what makes us "us" didn't really have much to do with us!
I sometimes sit in the living room and hear the sounds of you children playing in the house: Donkey Kong from the unfinished basement, dress up or Barbies strewn through the house, children running and laughing on their way through the rooms and life. What if. . . we hadn't started our famly right off, or had only four children, or I had worked full time from the get go, or we hadn't set ourselves back to get the letterbooks, or my parents had never put me in piano lessons. No regrets. I'll take what we chose and what happened. It somehow wouldn't be right if you were still all here. Just keep coming home to visit.
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