The other night, as I was putting my eight-year-old to bed, he was in a very thoughtful mood and wanted to talk. Usually all I get from him are grunts and slight head nods, so I was all ears. “What’s up sweetie?” I asked.
He said, “Momma, do you ever wish you could go back in time so that you could do some things differently?”
I told him of course there are certain things I wish I had done differently that I think about sometimes. I told him everyone has things they’d like to have the chance to do over. He talked through some things he wished he could change and I thought my heart might explode.
“Listen buddy,” I said. “Even though you may have done some things not quite perfectly and you wish you could change them, it is important to remember that every single thing we do in life leads us to our present moment, to exactly where we’re supposed to be. And even if we don’t do everything just right, it still makes us who we are today. It teaches us lessons, and it helps us know how to do better the next time. That is how we learn and grow.”
I told him it’s ok to reflect back on the past sometimes and to think through the direction our lives are going. But the most important thing is to learn from our mistakes and to make sure we do better next time. We should focus on the present moment and do our best to do the right thing in the moment, especially in the hard moments. If we can focus on that, we will not have anything to regret later on.
He pondered what I’d said for a few seconds, then looked at me and said “OK sounds good. Now about that computer game I was telling you about. I’m hoping I can get a million points overnight!”
This past weekend, my husband and I found ourselves in Johnson City, where I went to college. We drove by the ETSU campus and I showed him my old dorm where I’d sit on the stoop chatting with my friends, and the student center where all the action happened, the buildings where most of my classes were, and the computer lab where I spent many late nights. Then I showed him the bench I sat on when I made the greatest decision of my college career: what do I major in? What will I do with my life? Which path should I take? That was one of those Sliding Door moments in my life I look back on sometimes and wonder if I made the right decision. I wonder if I’d chosen differently how my life might look today. I remember that young lady wracked with confusion and uncertainty and feeling like she had to decide her entire future in one moment without all the necessary information.
I wish I could go back and tell her what I told my son a few days earlier: it is ok. You don’t have to do everything perfectly. You just do the best you can with what you know now. And you allow yourself to learn, and then you can do better next time.
I know we all have those things, those Sliding Door moments (for those of you old enough to remember that movie with Gwenyth Paltrow, it shows the consequences of two different paths based on her either missing the train or hopping on at the last second). These moments set the course of our lives and they put us down one path or another. And while these decisions are extremely important, I don’t believe that they are as critical to determining our life situation as the other million small tiny decisions we make every day. Our habits, how we treat others and ourselves, how we keep commitments, how we show up for others; these are the things that will really define us in the end. Not whether we chose one college major or another. Not whether we live in this city or that. No matter what the larger circumstances of our lives are, we are still the same person made up of those same tiny choices that we make day after day after day. And if we screw up and make a bad decision or a bad choice, or we don’t live up to our personal standards, we get the opportunity every single day to do better.
