Understanding the Illusion of the Road Not Traveled
We all go through life making a series of choices. I am faced with a fork in the road and must choose to go in this direction or that direction. We continue our journey choosing one way or another over and over again. Some of these forks in the road are about trivial matters, and some are significant major crossroads in our lives. We decide to go after this career instead of the other one. We choose to marry this partner rather than another or not to marry at all. We have children, or we don’t.
Our minds have the capacity for a vivid imagination. This capacity can help us imagine solutions to problems or plan for things. Sometimes our vision focuses on our journey through life at significant crossroads and considers what might have happened if we were to have chosen another path. We imagine how that road would have unfolded. We often imagine that road unfolding in a much better way than our actual road unfolded. We guess how that road was way better than the one we followed. This vision of the road not traveled can sometimes be very detailed and often meets all our essential needs. The more we focus on this road the more we grieve that path where everything worked out great.
⭐️The problem is that path only exists in our imagination. We are grieving the loss of something that never existed. We have only one path. It unfolds as a cumulative result of all the choices we have made along the way. We don’t know the consequences of other choices because that path does not exist. We imagine everything would have turned out great, but we don’t know that.
⭐️The illusion of the road not traveled can often lead to grief related to losing that imagined path. It can also fuel a sense of regret. I regret my choice because I now see the outcome of that choice. Regrets are often used as a stick that we beat ourselves with repeatedly whenever we revisit the choice. Regrets are a heavy load that weighs us down as we move forward from choices that we have made. Regrets are only useful if we transform them. They can be helpful if we transform them into intentions. Intentions are realizing or learning something from regret and using that understanding to move forward and avoid making the same mistake again.
I don’t think that people intentionally make bad choices. When faced with choices, I don’t think someone goes: “Hmm…. Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3, Hmm…. Door #3 is full of suffering and will turn out badly…yeah, I think I’ll pick that one.” Nobody does that. With all the things that press on me and the competing needs and considerations, Door #3 seemed like the best choice at the time. It might be that I could not perceive at the time that Door #4 might have been a better choice or maybe I couldn’t perceive Door #4 at all.
When evaluating our prior selves, we often beat up on them with some form of “What were you thinking?!! Door #3! Really! What an idiot.” This may seem self-evident and the resulting regret obvious and the present self-deprecation well-deserved. However, there is one problem, and that is a profound unfairness toward your prior self. Your prior self did not have knowledge that your current self now possesses. Your current self knows how the road unfolded. Your current self asks your prior self: “Couldn’t you see that coming.” Prior self could respond with: Well, no, I couldn’t.