Compass
You reach a certain stage in life when you are lost. Lost not because you don’t have a way but because there are too many ways! The guy from “The Road Not Taken” had just two roads and he knew he wanted to choose the one less traveled. He had clarity. Lucky him! I am sure you agree with me that having too many options isn’t a good thing. You end up over analyzing them. I mean, its simple math. The more options, the more permutations and a multitude of risk and reward scenarios and you HAVE TO choose one.
I picture it this way. A tree with a big trunk, the present, where things are clear. As you try to look further up from where you are in the present, things branch out growing thinner and thinner, the uncertainty, and eventually blur out into the leaves, distant future. You can only look up and wonder how chaotic the life can be when a small change in current state can result in a completely different future. But the scary part is you don’t know how the future will look like. We as humans want to have control over our future. We want everything to go according to a plan.
But lately, after a lot of thought and with the things that unfolded, I realized, life is full of surprises. There is no way you can foresee and accurately plan everything. As desperately as you want to have that control, its just not possible. One thing in specific that hit me. I always used to think, “what if I don’t do this now and later regret for missing it out?” For some very weird inexplicable reason, I rarely think about the other equally likely scenario. “What if I do this thing right now and regret doing it later because what I have now is good?” This is especially true when the action I am analyzing has a good chance of having a favorable outcome. Umm.. must be getting a little complicated. Let me explain with an example. Let’s say, I am at a hill station close to sunset. I have an option to leave and go to this amazing restaurant that I won’t be able to dine at if I am late. Until now, I used to be the kind who thinks “What if I don’t go to the restaurant? I will be missing out on an amazing dinner!” What I failed to think about with equal rigor was “What if I do go to the restaurant and will be missing the peace and calm of this hill station and the beautiful sunset that I expect to see in a while”. I hope you got the point. I realized in life there is always a “WHAT IF?”. “What if I choose this over that or that over this?”.
So why am I sharing this with you now? Because I think I figured out a way to at least reduce the number of “WHAT IF”s. You are rolling down this hill of life and have too many paths you could end up taking. If you just keep rolling, you will bump into lot of “WHAT IF”s, a lot of rocks and walls. The only way to reduce that is by finding an anchor. Yes, an anchor that will give you enough clarity to slow down, think and choose one path. And so poetically, the anchor becomes your compass leading you to a path that you will embrace happily even if it turns out a little bumpy because you know you did your best to navigate this complex landscape.
I found my compass..
