Burrito

Whenever the subject of our big move from Maine to California came up, my dad would mention that he had a previous job offer with Wonder Bread.  Had he not listened to my mother and instead took the job at Wonder Bread, he wouldn't have been laid off from the job he actually took and thus, we wouldn't have ever moved at all. "I had a job offer with Wonder Bread," he'd begin, "but your mother didn't want me to take it."  His words written in a sentence lack the wistful tone of voice my father used when he'd say it.  But the message is clear: there was a fork in the road and he chose B instead of A.  Choice B lead to California.  Choice A would have lead to me writing this blog in Maine, I suppose.

I say, "I suppose," because who knows what on earth my life or his would have looked like had we never moved to California.  Perhaps, had we stayed living in Maine I would have ended up living in Lewiston.  Or maybe his choice would have lead me to a life in Istanbul.  Or Peoria.  I might have grown up to be a waitress.  Or an archeologist.  Or a person that wears a costume and waves a sign on street corners.  Who knows?  It's all speculation.  Clearly, my dad was speculating a positive something had we never left.  A curious conclusion coming from a man that hated shoveling snow and tossed around the word, "Bitchen" kind of a lot in the 1970's.

People berate themselves all the time with this maneuver of imagination: comparing the choice they made with the choice they didn't; the final score being heavily weighted in the positive for those choices never made.  "Had I finished college..." "If I had followed my dream instead of just settling..." "If only I hadn't done XYZ,"....everything would be so much better now."

I can say with total assurance that you don't know shit about what that other choice would have brought you.   So why are you endlessly cutting yourself with imaginary knives?

True, you could have been happier at work had you chose to finish college.  Or not.  But choices aren't events that happen in a vacuum, independent of everything else.  "Happier at work" isn't the only conclusion you missed when you chose differently.  There's a whole other life of different regrets, failures, and disappointments you missed out on having made the choice you did.  It's not as if a single choice would have lead you into the life of being the Oracle of Delphi with the ability to foresee every other "better choice" ahead in your imaginary life.  And it isn't as if you were offered a carefree life of happiness or a pile of shit and you, being a stupid person, chose the pile of shit.

That's not how life works.  Everyone's got a problem.  Continuously.  Most of the time the solution to one problem requires the acceptance of another problem.  And so it goes.  For everyone.

To lead the life of your imaginary conclusions, you must forfeit everything else you have been given in life from the point of the choice until now.  Everything.  Because while your choices might have lead to some problems, they also lead you to some wonderful people, things, and experiences that you would have missed had you made the choice you didn't.

You don't get to select rice from the burrito of life and make yourself a bowl of it.

Everyone's got to eat the whole burrito, baby.