Choices. You have to live with them, both the good and the bad ones.
What you decide is a good or bad choice only comes with hindsight, and hindsight isn't neutral. Rather, it's the voice from the present that assesses the past, coding it in ways that make sense in the now, ways that may not make the same kind of sense later on.
In this, the struggle is to honour those choices for what they say about who you were, what you valued, what you had to learn. The struggle is also to be realistic about what you can "fix" or what you can do to shift the trajectory your choices set you on.
Then there's that overall lesson I learned about not knowing the reasons things happen until you do.
When someone I know was kidnapped in 2006, he escaped by hiding and running through the forest throughout the night. At some point, he came to a house, virtually by itself at the edge of the trees and he called out to those inside, saying his name and that he was a kidnap victim and asking for help.
The man who came outside, answered by saying his name in return, with familiarity and in surprise. They had known each other for three months in 1963 when they worked together in the Treasury.
I've never forgotten that story. Did they meet for that short period, forty years before, so that on that dark night of terror that victim would miraculously find, in that first person that he met, someone who already knew his name?
This is why you can't second guess your choices. You never know when you will find out why they make sense, you never know when you'll come to value exactly that thing you chose to do at that time.
You simply cannot foretell why you will come to honour your past and your passions and the simple ups and downs of mistakes and successes.
I'm trying to keep this in mind as I push ahead. I guess that whether my past choices were right or not is irrelevant. All that counts is the decisions that I make now. The rest I just have to trust and make the right meanings from. Who knows how I will differently assess my choices forty years from now, when suddenly they may make total sense in ways I could have never anticipated.
I guess it's about thinking about the past while not dwelling in it, thinking about the present as it empowers you to mediate the past and future, and thinking about the future while recognising that you can only get so far and know so much until you finally arrive.
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