Countless stories explore the idea of paths not taken, and how different some other direction might have been. Life can turn on a single choice, particularly when it eliminates other choices. You can’t help but wonder.
Existence only seems like an inevitable chain of events leading to Now in retrospect. At the time, it’s chaos. I can recall many seemingly trivial moments that changed the course of my life in ways I didn’t understand until much later.
Once, when I was a newspaper reporter, my editor bellowed across the newsroom asking if anyone wanted to take a weekend junket to cover an electric utility launching a high-tech energy storage project. Nobody else spoke up so I volunteered, and wrote a full-page feature on it. No big deal. Many years later, I applied for work as a science writer, and that article was the only thing I’d published that was relevant to the job. That began a new career for me, which led to freelance writing, which led to full-time cartooning.
If I hadn’t been in the newsroom just then, or if someone else had spoken first, or if I’d made other plans for that weekend, I might have had an entirely different life.
It’s natural to speculate on where that untraveled path would have led. I wish I’d handled some choices differently. But the way I see it, I can’t regret anything before my daughters were born, because every decision led to them and any different path would not have.
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