I’ve been contemplating the choices I have made in life off and on for a year or two now. I consider it the basic nature of how my midlife crisis is going to shape up. After all, I never wanted to do the wild and crazy things some people did. My paths untaken are those other ways I could have tapped my potential.
I’ve chosen to change jobs and change locations many times. I’ve focused myself on my writing rather than my art, my acting or my wrestling, just for example. As I walk through life, I have had to look at my talents and skills, then decide what I want to do with them. Some things I could have worked hard at to become a professional, I instead chose to keep as hobbies.
It’s easy to look back on your life and think of all the things you had the potential to be but didn’t become. It’s easy to feel a twinge of regret for the paths you never traveled. The thing is, each new path you take can only come by giving up the others. You sacrifice regardless. Would I have become an amazing artist instead of just an alright one had I not focused so much on my writing? Probably, but then you wouldn’t be reading this or any of my other works.
The point is try not to get caught up in the choices you didn’t make. No matter what you chose, you would have had to give up on something else. What matters is that you make the most of the choices you’ve already made and that you try to make choices you can live with in the future. After all, a life with few regrets is ideal, but a life with no regrets probably wasn’t ever lived in the first place. Take the chances and try to find happiness in whatever may come of them. So many of the best parts of your life may come from what seemed to be poor choices anyway.
What about yourself? Are there times you look back and wonder about how your life would play out had you made other decisions than the ones you have?
