Serendipity is one of my favourite words.
It’s about finding something good accidentally.
A pleasant surprise.
These days I’ve been chewing over many woulda-coulda-shouldas, if onlys and what if I’d done this instead.
Ever have those times where you think affectionately about someone you haven’t seen for awhile and then, out of the blue, you run into them? Is that coincidence? Serendipity?
Recently, two books came to my attention. nd T
The Midnight Library is about a woman contemplating suicide who is given the opportunity to experience all the lives she might have had through making different choices.
She gets a taste of what might have been if she’d become all the things she dreamed of: the rock star, Olympic athlete, wife, mother or businesswoman.
Ultimately, she discovers she prefers the life she has.
The Art of Self has a similar message — notice what comes into your life and appreciate it.
And know that you did the best you could with the knowledge you had at the time.
I often tell myself to quit beating myself up for not being perfect.
So many of us go through life as the mindless automatic vacuum cleaner randomly taking right angles here and there to avoid obstacles.
In my woulda-coulda-shoulda moments, I realize that the regrets I have are from times when I followed others’ advice over my intuition; how I let others divert me from the path I’d have chosen for myself.
Particularly if raised female, we tend to doubt our choices. We may have been conditioned to question our decisions and abilities.
The point is, it is a blessing we have the choice to make.
Our future is in our hands when we can choose from the options given to us. I would like to think that we can also seek options.
If I had the chance to live over again, I’d have chosen to take Latin instead of Mathematics in High School and not listened to my parents, who insisted Latin was a dead language. I found out later that Latin is the source of all languages. That is my main regret. How fortunate am I?
I choked up the first time I heard Susan Boyle sing. She’d been a single woman living with a cat in a small house in a small town in Scotland. Her mother had just passed. With the encouragement of her church choirmaster, she decided to enter the competition
It had rained the day of the audition. Wearing a borrowed dress, she’d taken the bus, and when she’d arrived cold and hungry, she hadn’t had time to freshen up before her name was called. Music critic Simon Cowell looked dismissively at the middle-aged, heavy-set woman before him. Then, his face beamed with shocked amazement when he heard her voice.
She came in second, but what she did win was a recording contract. She’s now a world-famous singer and a sweetheart of Scotland.
When I think I don’t want to be bothered doing something. I think of Susan Boyle.
What if Susan let her internal saboteur talk her out of trying on the morning of the audition?
She’d still be in her little house in a small town in Scotland, thinking, “woulda-shoulda-coulda.”
I’ve decided not to dwell on woulda-coulda-shoulda’s but on what I did do.
Squamish’s Melody Wales graduated from Ryerson University and has worked as a columnist for various publications.
