Friday, February 14, 2014

‘What if…’ and Regret



Every now and then, I would be asked by my wife about some ‘What if’ scenarios, like:

What if we don’t have kids, our lives will be …

What if we bought an apartment after we got married, we would be…

What if I stay where I lived before, how my life now would be….

All these are valid questions, but I would never have good or correct answers for them. Cuz, our lives are always moving forward, there is no going back. Yes, there is a theory of parallel universes. i.e. there are infinite number of universes that every choice we made would lead to different outcomes and actually all those outcomes are moving forward somewhere else in other universes. Coming down to earth a little bit, that reminds me the old movie ‘Sliding Door’, about what happen to a girl who caught a particular subway and couldn’t catch that subway on a given day, the different encounters that led to respectively which produced drastic consequences. 

To be honest, unless I had nothing to do, I rarely thought about any ‘What if’ scenario myself, cuz they always lead to nowhere. We all are responsible for our lives which are by no mean perfect. Many people compare our life as a movie, and we are not only staring in it but also directing it. However, we in fact rarely have a script and even if we do, the movie would never turn out according to it. We don’t live like the movie ‘Truman Show’.  Also, life has no ‘take 2’. We always go along what we run into. Even for people with boring livelihood like myself. There are still some important encounters and events that we didn’t really seriously plan ahead, and did change our lives. I don’t have a good memory, but just a few examples, like how I get my first job after graduation, how I met my wife, just to name two. 

So, thinking about those ‘what if’ would be just a waste of time. Cuz, we can’t change anything regardless they are good or bad. That also relates to the issue of ‘regret’. Honestly, I can’t recall any big regret in my life. Not that I’ve a perfect life. However, as a responsible and sensible person, I fully shoulder all the consequences of most of the major decisions that I made. They are not the best, but they were mostly appropriated at the time they were made. We can’t change a lot of things that happen around us, but we can choose how we react to them. I am no saint, but I believe that I’m a decent human being that never intentionally tries to hurt anyone. That was probably reflected in the past decisions that I made and remember, that’s also why I don’t have any major regret. I think that’s very important, cuz that gives me comfort every night before I go to bed and give me reason to get up every morning. I can’t imagine living with a big regret throughout my life. I can imagine that would be very hard. Of course, God forbids if that happen to me, I would have to find way(s) to deal with it. However, I would rather prefer not to do anything that would lead to regret myself in the first place. Definitely, I still make mistakes, but they are not serious enough to become a life-long regret, thank God!

In the near future, I can see that there will be an important decision to be made. I’m doing some researches to see what would be the most reasonable choice that would perhaps lead to an optimal situation for myself and my family. Hopefully, things would turn out ok.  My fingers are crossed!

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