But her voice remained in my head. How many of us live in the past! We can’t brush it aside easily. So many of us routinely like to reorder our lives, by rearranging some blocks in the past. If only I had studied this rather than that; or taken this job over that; or lived in this city than that. And so on. We make choices. All the time. It is unfair to ourselves if we went back and questioned that, because we can only choose one among the many choices we had then. That is how it is.
There is a mirage at play. The successful lives of accomplished people are portrayed gloriously in public. Many believe it is inspirational to know these stories. Only partly, I think. Where one stands today is known. And then we go back to fit a template on all those correct choices that person may have made. As if those were the only choices they had. How biased is that!
At every turn, one will face choices. Many of them will fail to deliver. A few will turn out to be right. And catapult one to fame. We selectively look at those things that went right. We make it look like those were the specific deliberate choices. As if those steps to success were so well known and so well laid out. Nope. Enough fumbling happens. Except that those stories that did not end well do not get that much attention and analysis.
