The Dangers of Reflection

I believe that life is a series of choices. We start with one, like a seed; as we grow, branches form, leaves sprout, and blossoms follow. So often our growth can seem linear, like a continuum in which one branch has travelled a singular journey. But there are other branches and other possible lives. This is the tree of life. Many religions and mythologies have talked about the tree of life. It exists within Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity. But we can also find it in our own philosophies.

For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – presented as a sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her.

It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we had said “yes” to different opportunities, tried new things, developed new talents. Easy to wish we had worked harder, loved better, traveled more, handled our finances more astutely.

It takes no effort to reflect on our missed opportunities - the jobs we didn’t take, the friends we didn’t keep in touch with, the dates we never went on. It’s not hard to see yourself through the lens in which others view you, and to wish that you were all variations of the person they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and to keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

Yet, it’s not the lives we aren’t living that we’re regretting, it’s the regret itself. It’s the regret the causes us to wither away until we are nothing more than a sum of our unfulfilled wishes.

We will never be able to tell if those versions of ourselves would be better or worse. In someways, those lives are happening alongside us, but we are happening too, and it is the happening that we need to focus on.

Of course we can’t live every life, fulfill every wish, say “yes” to every opportunity. Yet the feelings that those opportunities provide us are within reach. We don’t have to hear every song to know what music sounds like, or play every game to know how it feels to win. Love and fear, laughter and pain are universal currencies.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. Regardless of the choices we make, we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. The only way to learn this reality however, is to live.