Roads Not Taken

Normally my weekend starts with sleeping in until 9 and then catching back to back episodes of Clean Sweep. Then I’ll have lunch and putter away my time until supper and spend my evening castigating myself because I didn’t get anything accomplished. I also promise myself I’ll do better the next day (which I rarely do).

Yesterday I made a departure from habit, I went out for brunch with an old friend. We met down town at one of the local bakeries, the best kind of place for brunch. We caught up on personal news (it’s been a while since we’ve been together) and agreed we should do this more often and that growing old sucks. It was a quick visit, but even so the fresh air was invigorating and it made me realize that I need to get out more on the weekends.

Later on I kept thinking about the old “getting old” thing, which of course slid into the whole “where did my life go” thing (a discussion I’ve had a few times with a different friend). This, of course leads to a whole whack of regrets for the things I never did, but wish I had.

One of the dangers of looking back too much is that you get so mired in the “should haves” and “could haves” that you end up in a downward spiral of regret that is almost impossible to pull out of. But there’s a reason it’s called the past. It’s because it has passed. Short of building a time machine, there is no way of getting that time back.

By the same token, we can also become so focused on the future that we fail to see what is right in front of us, putting things off today in favor of a more benign future. Just as we have no control over our past, we have little control over our future either. No one knows what tomorrow may bring.

Focus on the present. Because in reality, the present is all we really have.