Hey.

How’s it all going today?

Did you sleep the sleep of the innocent, dream of angels and beauty or did your brain keep you awake with recriminations and worry?

Do you ever wish you could wind back the clock to the point that you allowed your potential soul-mate to leave – or that you left them?

What would you change?

What would you say?

What about that subject at school that you skipped that would have been so useful?

Or the time that you told your boss to fuck off and diverted your career?

Or the words that you wish you could have told someone and that you’d give anything to say now?

You’re not alone.

We’ve all been there.

If only.

If.

She would.

He would.

We would.

What?

Be happy?

How would you define that ?

Anyway, you know the answer really, we can’t go back, we can’t reverse what we did or where we’ve been.

We can’t find that moment when it all…..

She’d still leave for another reason, he’d still be the seething mass of hatreds and insecurities that he was then.

This is it.

This is where we are and this is all we have.

But that just means that you have choices, you have multiple choices every day, you can choose to reach out to that old friend and say hello again.

You can send a message on a Sunday evening to a work colleague who just lost their best friend and tell them to take all the time they need, you have their back.

You can donate to charity, you can help out at a shelter, you can cut your aged neighbours’ lawn or do their shopping for them.

You can study again, this time in a subject that fascinates you, not a random item in a curriculum that you had no choice in.

You can travel.

You can adopt a dog.

Of course, if you adopt a dog, you may have to get another.

And the little bastards may just break the armour that you’ve layered over your emotions and make you care about more than just you.

And you know deep down that one day you’ll lose them.

But the choice to live with unconditional love and companionship without judgment, that’s not a bad trade-off.

It’s one that I’d make again and again..

Whatever your choices, make one today .

And then again tomorrow.

We can’t go back, but we can try to steer which way we’re going as we move forward.

 Or as Marcus Aurelius put it

 ‘Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead’