Flipside

What was the last decision you made?

Perhaps it was what song to listen to. Maybe it was what to respond to your mother when she asked you of a favor. Monotonous choices made every day; what we decide to wear, what we're going to do for the day, how we're going to act. These selections are what come together to culminate how our day goes as a whole. Much of this goes completely unnoticed by us as well. Choices are made every single day, every hour, every second. These are all of the decisions that come and go without a second though. What muscles to move, when to take a breath, what to look at with our eyes. It's these disregarded happenings that are simply instinctual to our nature, things that we must do in order to function. Not a lot of thought goes into these movements, in fact they're more or less automatic. Nothing that could really have a great impact on our lives in the future.

Right?

It's captivating to sit down and just think about every decision we make and subsequently how we choose to respond. It's a very simple process, two or more options are presented, and ultimately one must be chosen. A great majority of the options are even more simplistic: to do or not to do. Yes or no. Basic two sided questions with the most innocent of intentions. It's practically a flip of the coin in some scenarios; we may not even care what outcome is the result of our choices. Some decisions are that meaningless. But who knows when a decision that seems like a regular choice for us could end up holding the most dire of significance later on? How are we to know when questions can hold infinite, radical differences based on bland answers?

Well, that's the thing. We don't really know.

Of course, in hindsight, we view our past choices with this knowledge of significance. We can dissect many different decisions and how they inevitably led to a bigger decision further down the road. Often we regret the original choice that was made. If only we made the opposite choice. If we would have known the repercussions of one choice versus another...things would have been different. Maybe it was something we said. Something we did. A missed opportunity that gave everything a turn for the worst. It's a struggle to imagine the flipside of any event, how it has affected us and how much we wish we could just take it all back. Start over again. Make all of the right choices so that everything we've lost can be reclaimed. Just then, maybe things wouldn't be so bad...

But that's no way to go living life.

The overlooming fact of the matter is that in our lives, we are responsible for the choices that form our lives. Our choices define who we become.There are some things that everybody wishes they could redo. Turn back time so that we can punctuate ourselves in the manner that we see fit. Regret is a terrible emotion, because it dwells on the past and what we could have done instead of focusing on the future and what is yet to come. The decisions that will soon come that may seem so astronomically unimportant at one moment, and then the most important choice we've ever made in our lives at the next. The chance to truly make up the person we want to be so we are not trapped wondering about the flipside.

But sometimes...you just can't help but think.