Looking Back

I’ve often thought that everyone should be born with an instruction booklet for the life ahead. A booklet that would tell us the end result of each of the many choices we all face along the way. Then we would be certain of choosing the right road, of doing the right thing. Of course that is fantasy.

As we age, there is a tendency to examine, and reexamine, our lives, to wonder what would have happened if we had opted for the road not taken. Would we be better off? Happier? Of course, we’ll never know because we traveled the way we chose and we have to be satisfied with that.

However, short of having had an instruction booklet, we must acknowledge that our instincts and intuition have guided us along the way to what was meant to be.

Some years back a colleague told me that while engaged he met another woman and somehow knew that she was the one he should marry. So he followed what his gut was telling him, broke his fiancée’s heart and married the new woman. They have been tremendously happy ever since. But so has his first fiancée who married a man she had once dated. 

            I think we can pay a price for not following our intuition. After being divorced, a friend confided in me that when she was walking down the aisle of the church in her wedding dress and saw her husband-to-be in the front her gut told her that it was a mistake, but she went ahead with the ceremony anyway. Would it have been a movie, she would have turned on her heels and rushed out of the church, but it was real life and she thought about the money her parents had spent and all the people there. Because she didn’t want to make a scene she paid the price. The marriage lasted only a few miserable years.

            In a movie I saw recently, Lauren Bacall complains to her daughter, Barbra Streisand who has moved out, that an old woman should not be left alone with her thoughts. The point, of course, is that revisiting one’s life is a risky endeavor. There is no point in chastising ourselves for the past and what should have been. I believe that we should simply acknowledge that we did our best and leave it at that.

            Besides, perhaps the Universe was keeping an eye on things and making sure we would make the right decisions – the ones we made.