Choices

Bella, responding to my advice to my 20 year old self, wrote this comment --

I wish I had chose someone safe, but I went with my heart and chose musicians, bad boys and Masters who were wrong, and now I am 35 and missed out on what I actually wanted. I didnt want much, just a house, a couple of kids and a husband who loved me. Watching my son play football Friday nights, and sending my daughter off to the prom. Making christmas and halloween, and thanksgiving, but now its all too late because I took chances. I,m looking backwards and it makes me so sad. I wish I had the last 20 years back, because my next 20 is going to be lonely.

And then sin added this --

Swan, I read your piece and while part of me agrees, I kept thinking, 'yes but if you had made those risky choices, you might have regretted it that you didn't choose safe.' So it's very interesting to me that Bella says exactly that in her comment.


Maybe we need a platform of safety to jump from?

I'd suggest that there is really no "platform of safety," as sin suggests, from which to jump into life.  Life is not safe.  Relating to others is not ever safe.  My seemingly "safe" marriage turned out to have a variety of very distinct and very specific pitfalls.  Most of those "pitfalls" were invisible to me at the outset.  Expecting to be able to predict the path that life will take is a fool's game.  All of our very best laid plans can be blown away in a simgle instant.  So, yes, if I'd made riskier choices, I might have come to this point with another collection of personal regrets.  Probably so.  Funny how that works.  We don't get to wander our way through life without encountering adversity and challenge.

Too, Bella imagines, from her perspective, that if she'd eschewed all those bad boys and musicians in favor of some safe, responsible, sensible fellow, she'd have ended up with "a house and a couple of kids and a husband who loves" her.  That is the fairy tale fantasy of "happily ever after" on which so many of us were brought up.  That marriage dream is so ingrained in our shared consciousness that it is rare to find a woman who does not imagine that marriage, family, and the house with the white picket fence combination is the absolute path to ultimate happiness.

It just isn't so.  The whole elaborate industry around marrying would have us believe that there is some magic to the whole business.  Marriage is not a solution; not salvation; not the be all and end all of relatedness.  Marriage is, at the simplest level, a contract.  It defines the technicalities of inheritance and parentage.  We've come to accept the notion that the "institution of marriage" is founded in love and mutual committment, but that is a very late overlay to what has been, through a very great part of human history, primarily a political and financial instrument.  Some of those alliances work out well. People find each other, create the contract, and go on to build families and lives and homes and all the rest.  Others run into all sorts of difficulties, and only a very few of those are visible to most of us.  To assume that that path is somehow "safe" is just naive.

I don't know the answers.  I only know that if I'd known when I was 20 how very iffy it is that life can be managed in such a way to make one safe and secure and happy and serene, I might have been willing to contemplate other paths and other possibilities and other configurations for my life.  Maybe, if I'd known, I'd have been inclined to trade the illusion of security and safety for a life that affirmed me and fulfilled me and allowed me to nurture and embrace the biggest dreams of my life.

swan