Pune is a special city. I mean, the people are amazing, the weather is nice, but most importantly, it resides cozily on the doorstep of western ghats. One can find many trekking or hiking enthusiasts in the city. (un)Fortunately, the quartet of my friends during the college days were all into it as well, and one day, we decided to go to a nearby fort. (This is a semi—typical story, I promise to keep it short.)
The trek went pretty average, apart from one thing. We had to catch a local train back home, and we miscalculated the amount of time it would take for us to get down. By the time we were at the last few hundred meters elevation, we ditched the trail and started running down the foothill that connected to the village directly. By doing this, we managed to catch the train just as it was departing from the station. The joy did not last long though, because my toes started to hurt as soon as I sat down.
When you start walking on a trail, you don’t know where it's going to lead to. Think about it for a minute. You are free to wander anywhere you like, yet usually you don’t go too far off from it. By doing so, you leverage the collective experience of hundreds of beings that have previously tried to walk on the same path.
A few days ago, I saw this video by CGP Grey, one of the finest content creators on youtube.
Out of all the great things mentioned in the video, I really resonated with one particular idea. He tells :
Well, life is a branching path.And its the trend of your decisions, some big, but mostly small, that will get you to more or less.
You can’t plan a route and then fail to follow it, because there is no map and unseen obstacles await.
I know everybody agrees to the uncertainties in life. Most of us have had to take detours in life due to things beyond our control. And still, we have somehow fixed a path to reach our goals and are trying our best to stick to it. Every time we are forced to take a different route than this, we tend to regret our (possibly forced) choices.
Don’t get me wrong here, I think regret is essential because it’s the sole reason our general sense of direction in life is preserved. Without it, loss and suffering would be no different than success and joys. It acts as feedback in a control system and pushes us to take action so that we get back to our desired path. I feel that there’s one more missing feedback though, and that is the sense of being grateful.
The bittersweet aspect of life is that it comes with many different possibilities. When we say the word possibility, we usually mean it in a positive way. But the word also spans into the darker side as well. In my opinion, this is what makes everything a lot more beautiful. Hear me out.
Meet Manasi. She is an Indian para-badminton player, current world champion, and changemaker.
She was living the life of a software engineer, where one day, on a normal commute to work, she met with a road accident. Manasi had to undergo amputation of the left leg. This is one of those dark possibilities that should not happen to anyone. The difference started to happen when she went back to the court to play badminton once more, to give a shot at her lifelong passion. In an inspiring comeback, she became para-world champion.
Standing at this point in your life, you can think of many different ways the trail could’ve diverged. Many roads where you would be standing far behind had fate caused you to take them. For instance, your lifestyle today was perhaps an outcome of your grandfather deciding to leave the village behind, and move to a city. For not meeting the positive possibilities, we do feel regret. But do we, for not meeting the negative possibilities, feel grateful? and that too enough times?
There’s no specific advantage in re-iterating how lucky you got from time to time, I agree. This is not supposed to be a life-long pep talk. However, I think you’ll agree with the fact that the negative possibilities seem to be more in number, and a lot more impactful in today’s times. There’s a lot that can go wrong. There’s a lot that you and I are supposed to carry till the end. If you look at this as a tool to offset this overwhelming side of things, won’t it be useful? By training to think downward counterfactually, we can convert most of this regret into gratitude. Ultimately, a fine balance is what’s important to keep going. If there’s a virtual penny we spend for regret, we can train ourselves to spend ten pennies or a dime on gratitude, and enjoy the dollar worth of life that happens here, that happens now.
