The Road Taken

When I was in my 30s, one of my friends commented that she thought I led a "charmed life."  This took me by surprise because, as with most people, I'd had my complaints, my moments of dissatisfaction, my private tragedies.  After all, my family didn't have a lot growing up, my dad died when I was not quite 19, I was a busy mom to three little ones less than four years apart while their father worked at a job that kept him on 24 hour call.  I didn't always love my job and the stresses of dealing with people's problems day in and day out.  I felt over-scheduled, frantic,  and not necessarily like I was doing my best as a human being in all of my many roles.

But then I got it.  I come from a long line of optimists and while we might have our moments of self pity, we don't dwell on them. We don't let them define who we are or live our whole lives based on something bad that happened, a decision we wished we hadn't made, a perceived slight. We look at a situation and figure out how to make the best of it, how to use it in a positive way, how to learn from it and keep going.  We laugh a lot and see the humor in just about any circumstance. We can be inappropriate, even.  :)

Now,  I will not say that I have always been good at this. Especially when I was younger, I had my regrets and my envies.  I remember one single friend who was well educated, a professional with lots of money, a traveler who would send me postcards from all over the planet. My ex would get annoyed and ask "Is she just rubbing it in?"   Part of me thought, "Maybe so!" but I tried to be charitable and think she was making an effort to stay in touch and maybe it was easier away from the job when she was relaxing at another fabulous locale.  :)  But I was envious.  How come she got to spend money any time she wanted and travel to exotic places when we could barely pay the bills?  Should we have made different decisions about our careers, where we lived, how we lived?  What path should we have taken that would have made life easier or more fulfilling?  It wasn't just about money, but about freedom to decide and freedom to live the life we wanted, and the life we wanted to give our kids,  instead of running on that treadmill day after day.  You may say that love is all you need, but there are lots of pressures out there in the real world, aren't there?

But, you know, I realized that she probably didn't care if I was envious. She didn't even know that I was envious. Her life was only making me feel "less than" because I let it. It was one of those little a-ha moments when I decided there was no point in having regrets or thinking about what might have been or wishing for something different. (And as a side note, I later found out that her life was not so grand after all...you could see that coming, couldn't you?)  

Somewhere along the path, most of us realize that everything that happens in our lives, whether we perceive it as good or bad,  creates the person we are working on becoming.  At this point, I am grateful for the learning in all of it and I can't say that I wish I had taken any different road.  Truth be told, I have been fortunate enough to have done everything important that I wanted to do: I got a good education, raised three wonderful daughters, engaged in meaningful work (paid and otherwise), I have great relationships with my husband, family and friends, I experience the pure joy in having grandchildren, get to travel and have new and interesting experiences all the time.  There are many more things I want to do, and I hope I still have plenty of time to do them, but I am not frantic about any of it any more.

I've been graced with wise friends. In my younger years, another told me that the secret to her happiness was a little philosophy called "bloom where you're planted."  Now this was news to me.  What?  You could look around and see all the things you thought were "wrong" and still choose to be happy and productive and involved?  Amazing.   That philosophy saved me, though, again, I am not always good at it.  But what a shift in thinking.  Life will never be perfect, you will  never have everything you once wanted or thought you wanted, there will be mistakes and heartaches and downright awful things that happen sometimes, but you can still choose how you react to it,  decide to live through it, make good decisions, and come out of it okay.  And then others might describe your life as "charmed."  And maybe you will, too.