The Path I walked

The Path I Walked

As I slowly sank into my late sixties, I realised how much I look back and reflect on the choices I have made as well as the times when they were made for me.  I guess a lot has been written about alternate realities and how things might have been different.  Science Fiction writers have found it a vast pool of possibilities that fuelled their fertile imagination.

There are times when I feel down and wish things to be different, but then I begin to imagine what may never have come into existence and realise how complex my personal path has been. One simple left turn instead of a right and the whole world around me simply never happened.  I am fascinated by quantum theories and the science of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes, but the simple truth is that I exist in a linear time line and cannot change one moment let alone a life.

I sometimes ponder on the simplest of choices that stand before me and realise that no sooner have I made a choice it is in the past and unchangeable. Okay, I can reverse some things; for example, returning to a physical choice and doing the opposite, but the past still shows that change and cannot be deleted.  I could be literarily taken from time, but the past would not change. 

So what do I gain from all this?  The realisation that I have only one pathway I can walk down and all the ‘what if’ thoughts become irrelevant and the peace I find comes from understanding that.  The past is a lesson to me; the future may not even happen for me; the present is exactly that… a gift to be treasured.