Para's Ponderings

I’ve never been the kind of person that’s been able to live in peace with the things I don’t know. I’ve never been able to move on, happy with the choices I make. I fixate on the choice I didn’t make. Did I say the right things? Could I have done something better? Where would my life be if I made the other choice.

This is only getting more prevalent as I age, as choices I made years ago are only now being found out to be have been bad decisions.

Life never seems to flow freely, I always find myself at crossroads, some insignificant, and others with the power to entirely decide my destiny.

All these years later, I find these contemplations echoing through my mind, I can’t help but wonder how my life would’ve gone if anything had been different.

What If I told this person how I feel? What if I had told someone what was happening to me when I was a teenager? What if I put more focus into my schooling instead of my relationship/s? What if I had been unafraid to be myself?

The reality is, I’ll never truly know. And although these thoughts may continue to linger until my eventual demise, it brings me to another crossroad moment. Do I accept my life for what it is, including all the awful choices that have brought me to this point.. or do I live in delusion? Do I flee from the real world at every opportunity in favor of a more pleasant, but fictional reality?

It is very easy to visualize where you’d like to be in life, and to ponder which choice not made would’ve taken you there, but the reality of the matter is that most people never get to where they want to be in life, and a lot of people that do have moved the goalposts so their aspirations closer match the life they inhabit.

If someone had told 13 year old me that she’d be working a customer service job, still living with her mum and in the midst of a divorce to a partner of 8 years, she’d be surprised, but not for the reasons you’d think. She wouldn’t be sad, she’d be amazed. Amazed that she has a job at all, amazed that even though it didn’t work, at some point, someone loved her. These were things that she never thought she’d have, these were things she was told she’d never have, because she didn’t deserve them, and she wasn’t good enough. This is by no means her ideal scenario, but it is life, and considering the amount of time she’d spend hoping she didn’t live into adulthood, it is amazing.

An idea I’ve always tried to stick to is that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and that thought brings me a great deal of comfort during difficult times. It causes immense contradiction with all the time I spend worrying about my choices, and if I made the right ones. Someone told me something recently that resonated with me deeply: There is no wrong choice, there is only the choice that you make, and although I am often too anxious and irrational to think like this, it is very profound, and shows me the kind of thinking that I would like to be employing.

Another idea that I’ve been relying on to get me through these spirals is Chaos Theory. In this situation, the idea that long term predictions for the future are insignificant because the smallest detail can alter things in immense and unforeseeable ways. This brings me to The Butterfly Effect, a concept within Chaos Theory that states that “small, seemingly insignificant changes in the initial conditions of a complex system can lead to vastly different and unpredictable outcomes” Linchpin theory is another idea I tend to circle back to, albeit in an adaptive manner, as it is usually used within political or economic theory “A linchpin is one person, thing or one act that leads to other actions and outcomes, like a cause and effect, or domino effect. One thing causes and leads to other things happening and emerging, and that one thing becomes a linchpin”

Everyone has impact, on other people and on the world around them. Your choices do matter. One choice made will not only impact your life, but the lives of the people around you. It will determine your future, the people you meet in that future, and by extension, their future, and the futures of the people in their lives. A small decision that you believe to be meaningless can impact the world in ways that you will never even begin to comprehend. Every choice you make is leading you to where you are supposed to be.

Will I still drive myself crazy by fixating on these choices? Inevitably so, but I am very well aware that everything I do is leading me to my place in life. I won’t know what that place is until I get there. There were times where I was ready to abandon that principal, when I was on the precipice of making a choice that would quite literally erase the possibility of me ever making a choice again. However, that wasn’t what I was supposed to do, so I didn’t (I was listening to this song while writing this paragraph, and it shows)

Uncertainty can be scary, and not knowing what the future holds can be absolutely horrifying, but the predictions and the assumptions that you make are what keeps everything interesting. There’s no harm in being wrong! I spent 8 years with a person who was never going to be “my person” I was in denial about it. In retrospect, there was no harm in me making that mistake. He wasn’t my person, but someone is, and I obviously wasn’t supposed to meet my person within that time period. Those 8 years taught me things too, things that will lead to the right person. Will that happen soon, 5 years from now? 20 years? There is literally no way for me to know, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and at the moment, it seems like I’m not too far away from it. Maybe I’ll be wrong. That’s okay too. I can take solace in the fact that if something isn’t meant to happen, it won’t happen.

At the moment, I am quietly hopeful. For the first time ever, I actually think I am on the right trajectory. Been making some choices I would’ve previously been too scared to. I’m excited to see what happens from here 🙂