I did what???

So here’s the thing with that great view in front of you. You got here because of a series of choices. The same goes for any not-so-great view, perhaps the same one you’ve been staring at for more years than you care to count. Doesn’t matter whether you’re desperately trying to create the life of your dreams—your own consciously sane style—or whether you’re there and just popping in to say hi, how ya’ doin’.


What matters is, you’re here (wherever “here” is). And, as I said, you’re here because you made choices. If your life to this point has been unconsciously insane, you may not have known you were making the choices you did—or they seemed like a good idea at the time. We drift into choices an awful lot.

It can be tempting to spend more than a few minutes (more of that over-analysis stuff) wondering how we got here and what we should’ve/could’ve/would’ve-if-we’d-known done differently.

Don’t.

It’s a waste of time and energy. Voice of experience talking to herself here. I am the queen of woulda-coulda-shoulda (It’s a beautiful country, but the view doesn’t change much; don’t like the weather? Tough. It’s not likely to change.) but I decided this year (finally) to abdicate my throne. I’m hoping it will get covered over with ivy and grass and other sorts of useful things for birds to nest in.

Where was I. Oh. Right. The view.

No matter what the view is—no matter what peak you’re perched on, how you got there is important for two reasons: one, you learned something that will help you create the path to the next peak, or two, (its inverse) you learned something you don’t ever want to do again. Ever. What keeps us stuck in the “what if,” though, is when we think about all the lovely trails we didn’t go down on our way here. Why do we think about them? In my experience, there’s only one real reason to “what if” the other trails (this is slightly different from the woulda-coulda-shoulda, which often carries a boat load of regret with it): we didn’t plan on reaching this point, it wasn’t where we thought we were going, and we aren’t sure it’s where we want to be (yes, that’s only one reason!). In other words, all the time we were hiking the path, we were unconscious of what we wanted.

This is NOT the same as exploring, or indulging curiosity. This is drifting. This is working, loving, living in a way that we just haven’t thought about, but maybe someone else told us it was the thing to do. And suddenly we’re here (wherever “here” is) and not sure why.

So, what next? No idea. But here’s a suggestion. Take a look around. Find the part of the path you most enjoyed walking. Find the particular angle of the current view that appeals to you most. Then let go. Realize that if you really want to, you can always walk back down the path and pick one of those trails (there are a few that are impassable by now, but only a few, and…well, as the saying goes, suck it up, because you’re here, not there) to explore. But also realize that it’s always possible you made the right choices all along.