in another life

In a different life, there is you and me. The both of us together, without a care, compromising as we go. We hold hands under the dinner table, whisking each other away with our touch, a quick glance saying more than words ever could. Together we made a home, with spaces that each of us fit in, with room to grow old as the scene changes about us. Your eyes in my mind, my hands in your hair, counting our years together on my hands first, then on yours. In momentum with one another, we create our moments as one. Yet that is not the timeline we experienced. 

In another world, I was too afraid to go to the job interview. I declined the invitation and was hired somewhere that wasn’t the pool that summer. Instead I idled over a computer, alone in an office, sorting paperwork and answering the phone. Sharing words with rotating strangers, spending my Friday nights out with highschool friends that were still in town. I discovered my love for quiet work, the kind that you muster the motivation for, but don’t break a sweat over. Seeking that softness in the work I find now, I’ll always feel nostalgia for that stuffy office, forever framing my approach to work. But I would have never met my friend Kamrynn, sharing laughter with another twenty something I met. Yet this did not happen either. 

In a distant time, I wasn’t scared of making a tremendous choice. Contemplative in my solitude away from school, I withdrew, packed up my belongings, and moved west again. In the sun the sand and the solace. Tying up my time in the midwest, leaving behind the tribulations, going with my guts instead of my head. I found my footing at a different place, immersed with a new group of people, given contrasting opportunities, I grew from where I placed my roots. Never looking back, maybe happier, maybe worse off. But I never met my friend Maggie, and I never found  my cat, but I found other ways to make my life bearable and finish my college years. Yet this was not my experience.

In another world, I woke up today at 7:30 instead of 9:00. I had an omelet instead of scrambled eggs. In a different life I am left handed. In a distant time I have blonde curly hair like my mothers, so maybe I keep it shorter than I do now with my pin straight brown locks. Or maybe I follow in my sister's footsteps, becoming a doctor at a young age, never putting on my first pair of tights and ballet slippers. In another world, I like cappuccinos instead of vanilla lattes, honeydew instead of watermelon, and maybe I went on a walk on a summer night and turned right instead of left and met someone who shared an insight with me that stuck with me for years to come.

As we go about our lives, every thought, every action, as miniscule or grand as it may seem, is actively constructing the life we live. For every choice is an opposite choice, in which we don't go through with a first date, or we change our minds about what to wear that day. Causing a domino effect on the proceeding events, some we may never know enough about to contemplate. I have my pivotal moments, as I'm sure we all do, that we can trace backwards long enough to know what part of us it influenced. If my friend didn’t move to college two years before I did, I would have never found friendship with someone else. And as we make these choices, or as choices are made for us, another timeline is created, where another version of ourselves lives out a different circumstance. We continue to collect these timelines as we continue to embrace our options, always somehow aligning ourselves with what is meant to be. Somewhere in the universe, we are living out all of our choices, a collection of all of our decisions. 

Seek comfort in the fact that in another life you are in another moment. Seek comfort in the fact that there is no right or wrong choice in any instance. Seek comfort in the fact that the choices you have made thus far have been purposeful, integral to the life that lays before you currently. One choice leads way to another and another, and as we leap from each we eventually look behind us and our life has been constructed; the life we see now, but also the other lives that exist beyond our being. What once used to be a point of stress, making a choice, deciding between two options, can now be fun! In what way can you create this life knowing in comfort that this is simply what you must experience in order for something else to take form. If I never decided to live in a different place for my third year of college, I would have never found my independence. To make a choice is to find a beginning. To make a choice is to gain a fresh vantage point.

Perhaps this is all too heady and I am deep in my introspection, but maybe in another world I don’t have a care in the world. 

don't fear your choices, 

natalie <3