When you are very young, you can take your life in so many different directions. Of course, only if you are born into privilege or even relative comfort. If, like me, you are not, your possibilities are much more limited. Not everyone gets the same starting point. But you still have an important resource, time, even if you don't have an even more important one, money. You can couple it with hope, ambition, dreams, determination, grit... and so on. As time passes, the paths available to you become smaller and smaller. You have either achieved some of what you wanted or you haven't, depending on what is even possible with your meagre resources. At some point in time you know you cannot study to become a doctor or an astronaut even if you finally could afford to, though that's not to say that someone who is terribly determined and passionate cannot do it. There are stories of prisoners studying law and all that.  I am not referring to the exceptional but the mundane way in which possibilities reduce over time. Your body for instance makes some things impossible. I know I cannot start to learn swimming to compete at some global level at this point. Instead of looking ahead at the vast expanse of possible paths you can take, there comes a point I guess where you look back at the paths you already took. Take stock of where you have come and what paths you had to leave behind unexplored. Every path you took closed all the other paths at every turn until you arrived at where you are. You still have paths available in front of you now, but they are much more circumscribed and going back to take a different route is much more costly even if possible. The question maybe arises whether you have travelled well so far? What does it mean to travel well? And what is it that you want to do in the remaining part of your life to answer this question positively? 

Those are some questions that pop in my head off and on. I have to admit, in spite of the maybe slightly pessimistic tone of this post, that I feel incredibly proud of myself :) Given the very limited paths open before me even when I just about started in life, it seems a bit amazing to me that I finally find myself at a spot that was not even in my broadest horizons then. I also feel proud of myself to have taken the turn I took almost 10 years ago around this very time. It required me to go back and start over, and the cost was indeed too high. Some of it I continue to pay. But I am glad I did... It sort of reminds me as my favourite quote by Rumi goes: "As you start to walk on the way, the way appears..."