Tag: regret

I could have…

Posted on by philipdodson

I could have been…well, many things but I wasn’t. I could have been a contender as Marlon Brando said in ‘On The Waterfront’.

We make a choice in life and at that time there could have been many other options that we didn’t take.

The fact is, it is in the past and whatever route we took or take the outcomes are always uncertain.

Therefore, the could have, should have, what might have been thoughts we have is a waste of time. We only use them to beat ourselves when we feel we made a bad choice.

The good news is we can still choose a different path at any time and even if we had chosen the other path in the past it could have led to a worse outcome too.

It is better to accept where we are and the journey, learn and make new choices than it is to lament missed opportunities. There are no certainties so better to enjoy the journey we took not the one we didn’t go on.

There could be a Walter Mitty in us all

Posted on by philipdodson

Each and every one of us has fantasies about a different life, where we say things that perhaps we are not brave enough to say in real life, or we do things that we are fearful of doing in reality…perhaps we skydive, bungee jump or wrestle bears. Perhaps we have the job we really want in our heads but don’t know how to get to it in our actual life.

An imagination and daydreaming are essential for creativity and sadly in our current world, there is little time for fantasising, daydreaming and imagining a different life.

If we do not act upon these thoughts, however, then there is eventually a danger that we live one life in our heads and a quite different one in reality which only leads to an internal frustration and eventually a regret.

We could become Walter Mitty.