A Different Path

"What if ...?"

That is a question we often ask ourselves. I personally struggle with that question often. I also often imagine how different my life may have been if my parents hadn't died. 

Would I be a daughter to happily married parents or would I just be like my siblings; a child with two stepparents? Would I have lived long enough to have stories to tell? What experiences would I have gone through? Who and where would I be?

You have asked yourself this question at least once! The thing about what if is that nobody knows what would have happened if things were different. There are a million possibilities as to how different your life may have been and no one has a guarantee as to whether they would like a different outcome.

It's easy to complain and lose sight of what we have when we are unhappy with something. We cry, moan and wish our life was different. For some reason, we often think that a different life means a better life. 

For the best part of my life, I wished I lived in different circumstances. I wished I had been adopted or grew up with different people because I assumed that my life would be better or that I would at least be happier. Recently I realised that I actually had a good life. I have no guarantee that my life would be better. None of us has any guarantees that a different path would be a better path. 

I have watched many movies were orphans were in the adoption system. Some never got adopted, others moved from one house to the other, others ended up with a terrible family. There were a few that ended up getting adopted by families that love them as their own. When I was younger I felt that of all the Disney princesses Cinderella was the one I could relate to the most. 

So there was I at my young age wishing that my life could be different. The thing is that I never really knew what life I wanted or what type of life would make me happy. So recently at work, I was asked to come up with a fable and create a lesson plan around that fable. Here is what I wrote:

Stella was not as fast as her other rabbit friends. Her ears were defective and she couldn't rotate them like other rabbits. She was often teased and left aside when other rabbits were being chosen to do different tasks. One day when Stella was at the river crying because once again she was not given a task she saw a bright light at the bottom of the river. Out of curiosity she dove into the river and saw so many reflections of herself. In her attempt to understand what was going on she reached out to touch one of the reflections. As she touched each of her reflections she was able to see what her life would be like if it was different. 

For some reason in all her lives she was never completely happy nor did she have a perfect life. After going through several life possibilities she realised that her current life wasn’t so bad.

The thing about wishful thinking is that we never think of the consequences of our wishes and desires. There are so many lessons we can take from this story. The one lesson is that we will never be happy with any path unless we make that path happy. A different life will not fill the emptiness you feel within. Some people if only I were rich; being rich comes with its own problems. Some people including myself say 'If only I could choose my family.' Every family has problems, there is no perfect family. If you haven't read my blog Blood vs Bond then I suggest you check it out. There I talk about how you can choose your family.

The moral of the story is:

Be happy with the life you have and make the best of it because you have no guarantee that any other life would be better.