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The Untaken Path: Why Every Choice Enriches Us
Introduction: The Infinite Branches of Life’s Choices
Life is always about making choices, taking options, and by definition renouncing other options. Options are taken either voluntarily and deliberately, opportunistically, or circumstantially. If our life is a tree, options are the many branches of that tree. We are the sum of all the branches grown or to be grown. The whole point of this article is to explore why growing a specific branch doesn’t mean the other branches must be completely forgone and forgotten — in other words, why in most cases, choosing is not necessarily renouncing. As heartbreaking as it is to make a life-changing choice, we can also let the other branches come into our lives to inspire it, and sometimes have a moment of reflection to look at them.
Understanding Life’s Crossroads
Studying medicine for most people means renouncing being an engineer, and moving from the US to Europe means forgoing an opportunity to live in Japan or to hang out as much with your family and childhood friends. People take a given option either because it fulfills a long-term goal they are working towards, a good opportunity they wouldn’t have anticipated presented itself (e.g., following a partner abroad, meeting somebody that inspires a career change), or their choice is circumstantial (e.g., no choice has truly been made, but the option is an obvious continuation of previous options). Unchosen paths are still within us and will still influence our present selves, even if we don’t directly pursue them, so maybe choosing is not that much about renouncing, after all, but about picking a primary lens to experience life.
Embrace your other selves
I encourage you to take regular breaks in the middle of actions that feel like routines, reflect on whether your current life and goals are still aligned with your values, and maybe invite one of the many you didn’t become into your current life, as if you were inviting a candid computer science student to do an internship among journalists: they might learn a lot about journalism, leave with some key takeaways on written expression, and maybe also come up with out-of-the-box ideas to improve how journalists work.
