Unknowns
Life is all about unknowns.
If I knew about my spinal tumor 15 years ago when it began growing would I have done anything differently? Nope. I still would have waited until it gave me trouble before pursuing surgery.
If I knew that the small business/three kids my husband and I started 30 years ago were going to be successful would I still have worried? Absolutely. If I hadn’t, I might not have worked so hard in those early years to launch it/them.
But also because I hold the world together with the mighty, mighty power of my worry.
I’m not a professional worrywort or anything, in that I tend not to worry about stuff over which I have no control. Meteors crashing into earth? My plane plummeting from the sky? Hordes of locusts? How my hair looks on any given day? None of the above. But if a kid doesn’t check in on time, or Nala the Wonder Dog starts limping, or my credit card looks compromised, you can bet my spidey senses start tingling.
When whatever I’m worried about turns out to be a non-event, my husband likes to point out that I needn’t have worried. To which I reply, “How do you know that my worry didn’t solve the crisis, huh?” Wait a beat. “That’s what I thought.”
Some logic is irrefutable.
Do I know how long I’ll live? Nope. Do I know if I’ll have grandkids? Nope. Do I know when the refrigerator will go kaput? Nope. Do I know if my next book will crack any bestseller list? Nope.
But I’ll know soon enough.
There is one thing, however, that I might have done differently, if only I’d known. I might have started writing mysteries sooner.
But who’s to say that I would have been in the right place back then? Maybe I would have been too stressed to do it justice. Maybe I wouldn’t have found my tribe to give me the support absolutely essential to success. Maybe I needed to have the life experiences behind me to have anything interesting to say. (And I’m making an assumption here.) Maybe I would have been swayed by some enigmatic Svengali to give up writing to pursue a career in tap dancing or welding or Olympic-caliber dressage instead.
Life is all about unknowns.
That’s what makes it fun.
Is there anything in your life you would have done differently? Are you sure it would have been a better path?
