I love this comic: Robert Frost: The road not taken
(And the poem, but the art is what I’m getting at here.)
Whenever I think that I wish I’d known earlier that I wanted to write novels, because then I could have taken different classes in college, and not started grad school for physics, and and and — I remind myself that I like my life, and I made good decisions for what I wanted to do at the time, and while my life would have turned out differently it probably wouldn’t have turned out any *better*.
If you took different classes and gone to a different university, I would have never met you! And that would be sad. Sure, I wouldn’t have even known you so in this alternate universe I would not be sad at all…but…still…you know what I’m getting at. I feel the same way too sometimes. I actually feel this way quite often these days when I’m so far away from most everyone I know. But we just have to make the best of what we have and the decisions that we make. And that’s about as philosophical as I’m willing to get.
As a fun mental exercise, sometimes I think about how I could have ended up in the same place with the same people by doing something different.