Life - Oh precious life

A friend recently posted on Facebook the question, "If you could go back and do it all over, what would you change? And you can't say you'd change nothing!" That friend does not have children, and children make a hard stop in one's timeline. I would never, ever want to go back to a time before Marcus was born.

Because I do not want to even conceive of him never being a part of my life. And three years is not much time to find an item to change. And whenever you think something is a good idea to make different, the movies always tell you there are consequences.

The 1998 movie, Sliding Doors, stars Gwyneth Paltrow and shows how whether she catches a train or not lead her life in two entirely different directions. Who knows how often that happens in the real world, but we've all stood on the cusp of those decisions.

- My father could have died in a studio fire where he lived, if he had been there the night it burned to the ground. I would completely lost contact with that side of the family if he hadn't dodged that one.

- I could have stayed in Minneapolis, after a impulse to leave Milwaukee struck me. Nearly happened, but fate and my complete lack of planning brought me back. (Special thanks to C.R. for telling me to buy a round trip bus ticket.)

And the big winner is:
When I graduated college, I took the lazy route. After seeing my good friend sending out hundreds of resumes trying to find the right job, I decided to take a week off, then go to Manpower and get working right away while I tried to find a "good" job.

They hired me on the spot to work for them, and that's the week I started working with Sasha.

If I had decided to pursue a radio/TV job, or traveled to Japan to teach English, I would have lost so much. I cannot begin to consider any past choices beyond something like, "I should never have bought that Balterspace CD."

And while I don't think it would have had an impact on the rest of my life, fixing the mistake of my 2nd worst impulse buy ever, would have robbed me of a kind of fun story.

In my life I've made a lot of choices, 40 years of existence will do that to most everyone. And I would never change a single thing before the birth of Marcus. Things are too fragile to mess with that at all.

Be seeing you,

Jon