Living life is like following a series of connected paths. When you’re trying to determine which path to follow, you only have the signs to help you choose. You cannot see into the distance to where the paths will actually lead and the signs can sometimes be misleading. We make many choices in our lives and each choice leads us along a path. Many of the paths look similar at the beginning but once we follow one, we can never know where the others may have led. Even when we look back, we don’t always recognise the path that brought us here.
Before the choices, there is the path we are born into. It seems strange to me how different my life turned out from my childhood friends and how different their lives are from each other. We all grew up in the same neighbourhood, doing the same things and going to the same school, yet the differences in our lives are immense. It’s unsettling to see how natural ability, luck and our choices can so dramatically affect our happiness.
Some of my childhood friends are successful, some are struggling and some are deceased. I don’t really know any of those people any more, even though they were so important to me back then. I know there isn’t that much between us, but I wish them all well.