Making Life Choices

I'm realizing more and more that many of the people around me are making choices that will change the rest of their lives. And I get to see how hard it is. It's also forced me to realize that choices I make now do affect the rest of my life, whether I want them to or not. My father always tells me that there are no bad choices at this point in my life. Only choices that will change my life.

It's hard to figure out which factors have to come into making life choices. When you are younger, choices are so much easier because they can focus on your family. You don't have to go very far from where you are situated originally and your most strenuous decisions are made more or less for you. When you get older and have to choose where you are going to attend university, there are so many more things that factor into the decision. There's your family which is sometimes less of the decision than it might otherwise be. Friends are important because they define your social life while you are in high school. Every so often there is a significant other who is important to consider, but also should not sway the entire decision. We realize that the decision we make will change the rest of our lives, but at the time it feels like less of a life changing decision than it really is.

Once we get to university we get to see that all the decisions are really more life changing than we used to think they were. We get to choose where we live, who we live with and what program will allow us to live the rest of our lives in the way we want to. It might be the choices we make when we are preparing to leave university that scare us the most. Many of us have fallen in love at some point over the course of our university career and we have to decide if that is a forever kind of love or a just for now kind. If it does turn out to be a forever kind, then we need to decide if that will lead to marriage or just living together to try and see if it works. We need to decide which of our dreams we are going to follow and which we are going to let fall. These are the choices that determine the path we set ourselves on for the foreseeable future.

We don't realize how many things we take into account when we decide where we are going to go. What language we speak determines which countries are open to us. The depth of our sense of adventure also does. Some of us want to be more settled and others want to take off for far off places. Some of us are unattached and others have someone permanent in their lives. We get to choose to experience so many parts of the world and of life and we need to figure out which ones we want to have. We need to figure out what we crave most in life and what our deepest desires are. Once we do, making life choices becomes a lot easier. Or maybe they still remain hard. I haven't quite figured that one out yet.