Life is not endless opportunity. The person I could have been had I never started writing is long gone. That is what no one understands about the possibility of life. You begin with countless paths, but the more decisions you make, the more this gamut is curtailed. That is why decisions are crucial, and that is why we get to make a plethora of them in one life. Every decision starts a path towards becoming a certain kind of person, but it almost always also removes the other possibilities. Even if I stopped writing a word today, the course I have been on up until now would not be erased from memory. The years will have been spent, and for better or worse, I will have written regardless of if I continue doing it or not. It is a paradox of possibility: it is always infinite, but when you look closer, some of that infinity has been spent already.
To do something is to buy into the future that doing creates, even if you only do it once, even if you never do it again. As I sit here, having made all the decisions I have made so far—to hold on, to let go, to keep going, to stopping—I wonder whether we make the decisions or the decisions make us. Would I be a different person had I done things differently or did I do those things the way I did because of the person I am? Of course, these are but musings of someone with too much time on his hands, for a change. As much time there is, there is always more we have to do with it. No matter how free someone is, they will always have things to do. Perhaps, no decision I make will fully take this away from me: a coarse urgency. It has always plagued me, but the days lately feel like a start.
I have always been in a hurry, and because of it, I have always been late. I have been late in holding on, I have been late in letting go, I have been tardy in my will to keep going, and I have stopped in all the wrong places. For all decisions and all their consequences, at all times, I have had the looming fear of being late. No decision has been able to change this much for me—until now.