Life is full of choices. Each of them takes us further down the road, never to find the same intersection again.
We all want to do a lot of things with and in our lifes. But that's not possible.
I'd love to have my own place, one I can call home; I'd also love to keep traveling, never really settling down.
I'd love to have the experience of having a kid; I'd also love to do the things I couldn't do if I had one.
Our lifes are finite, so we must choose. Some of these decisions scare us to the point of paralyzing us.
"The reason why fantasies of the future are so much more pleasant than doing them in the present, it’s because we get to hang on all of them. It is the choosing that is painful, choosing what we will do and what we don’t that most avoid doing."
-- from a podcast I listened to, whose name I forgot to write down :(
When I quit my job to become a full-time photographer, I had a fantasy: I'd travel the world, visit all continents, make images everywhere.
I wasn't so naive to think I'd travel so much, but I was expecting to go to many more places than I have ended up going to so far. In part because of the pandemic, which was a choice none of us wanted to take but were forced to.
Even though I'm still young enough to keep traveling for years to come, every time I decide to go somewhere, I'm also deciding not to go somewhere else. One decision at a time, I'm carving a path; one with many destinations, but one that will skip most of them.
I did not understand that one future comes at the exclusion of all others.
I had wanted two kids.
I had wanted to travel the world.
I had wanted to be the one to hold my mother’s hand at the end.
Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.
-- No Cure for Being Human, Kate Bowler
Whether we want it or not, we must choose. We will miss on many, many things; we will get to do just a few, to experience a handful of them.
That's why it's so important to focus on what we do get to do, on what we do get to experience. And to share it with those people whose path didn't take them the same route.