Why I’m No Longer Wondering “What If?” | The Millennial Edit
Looking back at life events and imagining your path going in a different direction can be a fun daydreaming exercise. However, in this week’s edition of the tonebase blog, Rosie Bennet shares how pursuing happiness over success at every major life event will lead to an existence where asking “what if” becomes unnecessary.
In a world where everything is so accessible to our imagination, it is hard to be happy with what we already have.
In eras passed, young adults were delighted to secure stable work which would give a decent income, to find a partner with whom they could share marriage and procreate with, happy to not ruffle feathers, and have neither too little or too much of anything.
The millennial mentality is far removed from contentment in comfort zones.
Nevertheless I am sure there have always been moments in life where we reach a cross roads, and where we wonder when looking back if we made the ‘correct’ decision.
Especially in a creative lifestyle it is hard to not imagine that our lives may have been simpler had we not taken such a vocational route.
After all, it is when we follow passion that we end up making sacrifices often blind to the fact that we may be making a terrible decision, be it our sanity, our time or our desire to make money!
I have personally spent years curious about my ‘ghost life’, wondering if I by now would have been the current owner of an Oxbridge degree, an actress with a few small but accumulating parts to my name, a nurse, a translator…
If I would have been living in a different country to where I am now, if I would have stayed in the UK, if I would have made a life changing travel around the world.
Would I feel more successful than I do now?
Would I feel like a real master of my trade, or would I feel the same as I do now, that my passion has led me into an ever expanding job description, with many facets, all of which please me, and most of which surprise me.
Something that a real imagination gives you, I feel especially as an only child (sorry to my step brother), is the feeling that through reading stories, watching films, visiting places and meeting people, listening to their stories, you feel you have lived hundreds of lives.
Already by the age of ten I remember feeling genuinely that I had already experienced life as a Cowboy, and that the outlaw life was rooted somewhere firmly in my opinion of how I saw the world.
Jokes aside, music is a constant imagination expander, it is a particular introvert pleaser, because our perception of music subconsciously creates a whole world that is totally unexplainable in words or time.
Perhaps this lifestyle is why I no longer wonder what if in a negative way. I no longer feel anxious at the prospect of a missed opportunity, or of having not followed a path that now seems far away.
After all, anything is always possible.
I truly believe that if you pursue happiness instead of success, or a plan for success, you will not be caught off guard by ‘what if’.
If at every moment you choose the action that makes you happy, the thing that you know will give you immediate happiness, then mostly your answer to ‘what if’ will be that you would have been less happy for another decision.
You may believe that if you had practiced 6 hours a day instead of 3 that you would be much further than where you are now, but honestly? What would you have really gained with those extra 3 hours a day?
A common music related ‘what if’ is ‘what if I had started playing earlier’, the real question we should be asking ourselves is, what is it that is making us unhappy right now that is causing us to feel this lacked life?
Is there something we can actively change now?
As soon as we start looking forward instead of back, that’s when we can really start to enjoy life guilt free, after all there’s no second take.
About Rosie Bennet
Born in London in 1996, Rosie started playing guitar at age seven. She received her early musical education at The Yehudi Menuhin School of Music and went on to study with Zoran Dukic (The Hague, NL), Johan Fostier (Tilburg, NL), Rene Izquierdo (Milwaukee, USA) and Raphaella Smits (Leuven, BE). She has performed in festivals all over Europe, including Open Guitar Festival in Křivoklát, Czech Republic, Glasgow’s Big Guitar Weekend, Scotland, Porziano Music Festival, Italy and the West Dean guitar Festival, UK. Highlights of her concert career include performances at Wigmore Hall, London, The North Wall, Oxford and concerts given on El Camino De Santiago.
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