In the movie Sliding Doors, Gwyneth Paltrow plays a woman whose life splits into two parallel paths. In one, she just makes it onto the train before the doors slide shut, then arrives home early to find her boyfriend cheating on her, and begins to remake her life. In the other, she misses the train and arrives home on time, none the wiser about her cheating partner.
Are our lives like this too? At every moment, does an alternate universe open up, in which we follow the path not taken? A life in which we played soccer instead of gymnastics, in which we bought the apartment in the city instead of the house in the suburbs, or even one in which we had to stop at every red light on the way to work, instead of getting all greens? How much do those “million decisions that mean nothing” affect our lives?
Are there an infinite number of universes, where our every possible life is lived, while we live with the consequences of our choices in this one lifetime?
“Each moment presents a newborn universe.”
Zen teacher Steve Hagen
While I certainly cannot attest to the existence of a multiverse with all of our possible destinies playing out to their conclusion, I do tend to make my decisions this way. When faced with a difficult choice, I attempt to plot out the trajectory of my life along the likely path each option would entail.
I am a thinker and a list maker, so I put pen to paper and list the positives and negatives, the possible regrets, and the best and worst possible outcomes for each choice. I envision the watershed moment, where my life, like the current of a river, would split into two different streams. Which one should I sail upon?
The hardest choice I ever made was at the end of my senior year of college. I had two options in front of me: I had been offered a job in marketing research for a software company, and I had been admitted to a graduate program in Education. It truly felt like a watershed moment in my life ~ would I be traveling down the river toward a corporate career, or toward becoming a teacher?
I’m happy to say I still have the several pages of lists and speculation that my twenty-two-year-old self wrote as I pondered my life’s options. Clearly, I found the decision agonizing:
The blessing and the curse of a tough choice
Looking at these lists now, sixteen years later, and sixteen years into my teaching career, I am amazed at what my worries were. I am surprised by the similarity of this old me to the current me. And I am blown away by how I ultimately characterized how I arrived at my final decision.
I love that I highlighted, from a long list, my top worries for both choices: “I might not like it. I might hate it,” and “Would it be fulfilling/rewarding?” That sounds like me.
My “Positives” for the marketing job were about the financial stability {as opposed to graduate school debt} and the resume-building experience. With teaching, I wrote about how I had always wanted to be a teacher and make a difference.
But here was the most shocking thing I found in re-reading these lists. At the bottom of the software job column, I wrote:
And under the graduate school column, I wrote:
I would never describe myself as being romantic and idealistic over being pragmatic. If anything, I am pragmatic, left-brain, and analytical to a fault. I am a classic “INTJ.” I make decisions with my head, not my heart.
And here I was, making one of the hardest, most important decisions of my life, and I followed my passion. Under “Positives” for going to graduate school, I wrote:
I often wonder what my life would be like today, who I would be today, if I had made my life decisions differently. I could be a corporate career woman. I could be teaching at a different school. What would have happened had I gone to a different college, with different friends, professors, classes, and activities to pursue? Would my passion for teaching still have been ignited? Would I have met my husband? Would I be a mother? Who would be my children? Who would I be?
I don’t believe in fate, I don’t believe that we are following the one predestined path that was “meant to be.” I believe, in many ways, in the same thing I tell my students about choosing a college: there’s no one “right” place for you to end up. You can be happy in so many places. In our lives, there are many paths to happiness and fulfillment.
Perhaps that’s what makes the choices so hard. We know we are talented and powerful and can succeed at many different things. We know we have many passions to pursue. Sometimes, we arrive at the watershed and have to decide which river we will follow, and both are breathtaking and beautiful and shimmery.
But the current isn’t so strong that we can’t paddle our way back in case our chosen stream leads us to a swamp. Life is a do-over. I chose the shiny and exciting college in California when I was 18, but called a do-over the following year and transferred to the college that was right for me. Rarely do we hit a true dead-end.
I think we know we’ve made the “right” choice when we look back, when we even find the lists that reflect our conflicted thinking, and we cannot even remember that we once consciously struggled with the choice. We can’t even recall how much it “sucked” to agonize over our choices. Though it may not be destiny, we know we are where we want to be. We’re on one of the infinite number of beautiful and shimmery rivers.
This post is part of the Finish the Sentence Friday linkup. Click the image below to read more posts finishing the statement:
“The hardest choice I ever made was…”
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Top photo credit: U Kersting via photopin cc
- A Mindful Approach to New Year’s Resolutions - January 13, 2020
- Just This Next Step - December 16, 2019
- WAIT: A Mindfulness Practice for Waiting in Line - December 9, 2019
