About missed opportunities that are not missed

One of the most useful things I have learned from experience in life is that there are no missed opportunities and that, for my own good, I forget this once and for all. With all my heart I do not believe for some time that there is only one way to something and I do not believe that there are opportunities that when you miss them, you have missed a chance of life and you will never be able to reach the goal again, but you will only stay forever asking “what it would be”, the most useless question of all. Like hell.

“Had I slept less, had I traveled nights as well, had I not been so exhausted, had the plains smaller and the hills lower, I would have gotten back in time, she wouldn’t have married Emin, and I might not have left the village. And none of these painful things would have happen, not Harun’s death, not the last night of mine. But maybe they would have, because there has to be a last night and there has to be something painful, always.” – wrote Mesa Selimovic in his novel “Death and the dervish” And when it comes to someone else, it is crystal clear to you that the plains could not be smaller, it is meaningless to wonder if the hills could be lower and that it is stupid to expect from yourself that you also travel by night on the same hills that could not be lower and by the same plains that could not be smaller. And they are not, just because that one does not arrive in time. Why are we so much stricter when it comes to ourselves?

I made my life easier by very much the moment when I realized that the opportunity lay right behind every corner and that fantastic ideas came to mind every day. Why not? There was a situation I really wanted to happen in my life, I was overwhelmed with them for days and nights, moving and calculating, and there was only one hundredth of a second in which I just blinked, getting out of my mind for a moment and exactly as much as it was not mine to happen. There were also incredible fantastic opportunities that I said “no” too, just because something was telling me that in my list of things I want and do not want the underline total of live would not work for me. I have the feeling that the best things out there are a step behind that one of the good options you agree to and which is not exactly what you wanted, but it will serve. There somewhere behind that line we often do not dare to pass and thus reject something that’s just “ok” and wait for something that will be perfect, and no one guarantees that it will ever come.

And more and more I know that the most important thing to do is do not be burdened by the fact that something might have happened. And that you can come from Ilok to Dubrovnik in a million ways. And there is not a single right or wrong way, and leave an open option to shift somewhere in half somewhere around where you want to go. Because every way it is right if we think it is right and every way is wrong if we think it is wrong. And it seems to me that we are all doing exactly the right thing, though sometimes it seems meaningless. But “Man is cursed and sorry for all the paths he did not pass, and who knows what was waiting for me on them,” Selimovic concluded long ago. And no matter what kind of path we are walking on, which plains and hills we step on, they all lead somewhere and to someone, even if we are the biggest jinx we will end up somewhere. And we’re probably not the greatest jinx in this world 🙂