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Maybe they'd have to hold each other when it rose, all organe and full and close. Maybe that's where our romantic notions about the moon first came from. Two people holding each other to keep their hearts from breaking, because everybody they knew was dying in the cold rocks and dust piles a quarter million miles away...
The Brothers K
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søndag, juni 20, 2004
I'm not the kind of person who lives with many regrets. Generally, I'm ambitious and unwavering. I sieze the moment opportunistically, or if it's a more serious matter, it may take me a long time to make a decision, but once I've made it I've generally stuck by it. I think it's usually because I tend to trust my gut instincts, and my gut is rarely wrong (in fact, I don't know when it has been). The problem usually comes when I have to rationalize a decision. If that's the case, it means I'm deciding against my gut instinct, and I have to consciously expend effort to convince myself that it's the right thing to do. And then, even after the decision has been executed, my gut feeling won't have changed and so I must continue to rationalize my decision to myself. The problem is that gut feelings don't go away, while it's easy to forget something in your brain.
Such a conflict between my heart and my brain is what is causing my regret now. I only have one regret about my time at Stanford so far, and it's not one that I can even rectify. It's an opportunity that I had, a risk that I could have taken, and decided not to, because it was the smart thing to do, even though my gut told me otherwise. And now, the time to take advantage of that opportunity has long passed, and I've moved on, but I still regret it. I would jump at the chance to redo that one moment in my life. Every time I reencounter that moment in my memory, I wince, mostly in frustration at the stupidity of my actions, but it's also tinged with more than a little sadness at loss. How would my life be different?
The biggest issue I'm encountering though is that I can't let go of it. I keep conspiring to find ways to give myself another similar opportunity, but it just won't work if I try too hard. I just need to come to terms with the fact that I let this one get away, and I'll have to live out my life knowing that I let a good opportunity pass by me. But how the hell am I, an optimist at heart who would love to retain the hope that someday, somewhere, sometime, something might be possible, supposed to come to terms with the absolute denial of that optimism? That's where God and fate come in, I suppose, to reassure me that I'm being cared for in the best of ways and that if it was the best thing for me, God would make it happen. Sigh. I wish I could just trust that, and let it all go. It'd make things so much less painful for me.
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