Mourning Lives We Never Lived
Today, you made a decision. Several, actually. Maybe last night you decided to set your alarm for 6 a.m. thinking you would hit the gym before work and yet, here you are, slamming snooze for the fifth time and it’s now 8 a.m.. Maybe you woke up like clockwork to have a simple breakfast of cereal instead of pancakes. Maybe you told yourself that you would talk to your grandmother today, only to forgo a phone call citing life’s myriad of unpredictabilities. Unknowingly, that was the last chance you had to speak with her.
Whatever you did or didn’t choose… Do you regret your decisions?
I often think about the countless lives I never lived due to the decisions I never made. Or, more accurately, the decisions I made that forever closed doors to opportunities and experiences I may never see again. The numerous AP classes I took in high school were supposed to get me into the college of my dreams but when rejection letters slapped me in the face, all I could think about was how my time could’ve been better spent doing art, writing, or quite literally anything else.
If I had used those hundreds of hours dedicated to schoolwork on my art, would I be a better artist by now, a better writer? Like a walking funeral, I carry the deaths of these decisions with me wherever I go, and sometimes, they haunt me, as if the ghosts of every wrong choice forever lay dormant, ready to pounce the second my mind stumbles into anxieties.
Ruminating about the possibilities I’ll never experience or the separate realities I never realized is an infinite cycle that, frankly, will never end well. How often have you thought about going into the past and changing something ever so slightly because you think that maybe your life could have been marginally better had you taken a metaphorical turn to the left instead of the right? Chances are, your answer is more often than never. If these thoughts cause us so much heartbreak and turmoil, why do we constantly think about the lives we could’ve lived instead of focusing on the lives we have now?
Looking into the past from the present day, we are often able to pinpoint numerous instances of where our actions could’ve been different. We often think, oh, me of the past, why didn’t you choose this instead of that when it was so obvious? It is only obvious, however, to you now, not you then. We think about the differences we could’ve made in our past because we’ve lived the other path; we’ve lived through our mistakes and misfortunes. We finally know what the right answer would’ve been and have the deceptive infinity of time to sink into our minds and soak in the regrets of our shortcomings. The beauty and horror of being human, I suppose, is our incredible ability for introspection and deep thought. Is having gone through these experiences, though, actually such a bad thing? Of course, I have many things in my past that I wish I would’ve done differently had I known then what I do now, but if I changed everything I wanted to, would I still be the same person I am today? The experiences I’ve lived through and the mistakes I’ve made have allowed me to learn and evolve as a person, even if that evolution has come with growing pains. So should I really mull over the small regrets I have in life if they’ve shaped me into the person I am today? Should you?
Right now, I am myself from the past. Someday in the future, I will look back at the time when I began writing one of my first articles in my very first magazine publication, and be grateful that I took an active step towards my goal of becoming a better writer. So while I may be doomed to mourn the lives I never lived in the past, I can just live the life I want now, right? Who I am right now is my past, present, and future self, combined: Everything I do now is something I will reflect on later and will become the basis upon which I take future action. Focusing on my life as an all-encompassing amalgamation of time offers a new perspective: I am who I have been, I am who I am now, and I am who I will be. In approaching life from this new point of view, I can stop worrying about the things I haven’t done because it’s not the life I lived in the past that matters, it’s the life I’m living now.