“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
~ John Greenleaf Whittier
We make choices. So many choices. Some just seem to happen, almost without our knowing, and others we weigh back and forth, and back again. Some things over-thought, some not enough. Time passes and every so often we revisit choices gone by. As much as we may wish for certainty, there’s never any way to know if the best choices were made. Indeed, is there ever any completely right choice? The best we can do is the best at the time with what we’ve got, with who we are then. But will that still be the best, as we may see it, far in the future? And does that even matter? Can we find some comfort in that? That the path not taken perhaps would not be so sweet if it had been real.
Our memories are not exactly accurate recalls of the past so much as they are recreations of the past. Everything before and since has an effect on how we remember, how we reflect, and how we go on. For go on we must, no matter what wonderings there may be. For there will always be questions, other paths not chosen, by conscious choice or by destiny. And barring any ability to live in parallel universes, experiencing all possible journeys, every choice lived out, there can never be a way to know just how different life would have been but for…
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More questions than answers. But still we keep questioning. We seem to have this innate drive to figure things out, to understand who and what we are, and why things happen the way they do. Or at least we try to. Joy and pain both found in that challenge. In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote that, “the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Not the way I might have designed it, but that’s not one of our choices. Another quote that I find both poignant and comforting is a contemporary one from TV, “Mourn the losses because they are many. But celebrate the victories because they are few.” Here’s to seeing all the joys and little victories of each day, celebrating every one.
But we can never live all the choices, experience all the possibilities. We can never know all the ‘what might have beens.’ But at the end of the day, be it a literal one or a lifetime, maybe the best we can hope for is to find an inner peace with our choices, and the way we have lived with all the possibilities, both real and imagined. For better or worse, the life has been ours, and we have lived it, thinking, feeling, and being.
If I may add a thought to Whittier’s famous line:
The happiest are these, for throughout it all, we have been.
