…the realization I could have lived different lives is only now becoming real to me. The one I chose (or that chose me, whether by fear or fate or circumstance), is only this I know. Even as I write this, I only now understand Frost: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…”.
The question is, what would I have become in a different life, under different choices or different circumstances? I say that remembering the controlled chaos of family life as a boy and teen, how much I liked it and wanted the same. But no, I’ve grown instead into someone solitary who prefers, even needs, long silences. Obviously, the “me” I am today was always there, waiting. But reflecting, I don’t think he was the only one. Perhaps, as in the proverb about the two dogs, I grew into the one I fed.
But there were more “me’s” than just the one other. I know because, as I’ve grown older, I’ve begun to see their shadows. They drift just beyond my vision or consciousness, lamenting their own unrealized dreams.
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This is excellent writing with universal applicability. Your acknowledgement that you chose your current way of life and must therefore assume responsibility for it is a major theme in existentialism. We are radically finite in space and time and can live out only fragments of our potential lives. Some view this as reason for despair and seize on a dubious promise of an eternity in which all of those potential lives can be actualized. Others see this move as bald-faced flat-footed wish-fulfillment and are resolved to have none of it. There is an abundance of meaning to be had within the limits of the Biblical three score and ten if you harbor the resources to create such meaning, and if you don’t, well, that is just too goddamned fucking bad!