Diverging Paths...

It's interesting how people's lives take so many different turns in so many different directions. One may be 45, single, and not interested in otherwise, or one might be 22 and looking for a life-long commitment. One may be a 24-year old investment banker at work till 2 am, or a 29-year old professional student, still trying to stall getting into the real world. I work in a company where the majority of employees are married, some with kids and/or pregnant. These people are not much older that myself, but for me - motherhood is something for the distant future - and not for now. To imagine being a mother now is just insane, I am barely getting my life together, let alone the ability to care for another. For them - it's what they want, and they need right now. It's so funny how two different realities can both be right, in their own ways, for different people.

I know people who have changed directions, done a 360 and ended up in a completely different place from what they first expected.This scenario is very much true of my own life. I started off in a very academic school - incredibly challenging, full of brilliant young minds - the promise of tomorrow's future. Ironically enough, graduating from there got me nowhere. I was a restless mind in search of occupation. It took going to a school, so dumbed down from where I first started, a curriculum that was a joke compared to what I was used to, and being classmates with a bunch of giggly over-dressed-at-8am girls to actually start a promising career. And that's just the way it worked out. For some, fashion was never not an option. For me, it was a shot in the dark - a hope against hope that I would find some direction. Even within my classmates I found many different realities. Some had never left home, and those, like me, who had been away many many years. Some still have never strayed far, yet others have travelled the world and back.

What guides these paths? Is it out individual choices? Is it fate, or destiny? Or perhaps more likely it is a combination of both. Sometimes I feel bad for the 45 year old that still lives with room-mates in a city apartment, or the person who is searching for their soul-mate at 23, or for 34 year old student who can never seem to focus. But then I take a step back and I realize that their choices and their paths are what's right for them, and although mine may be something very different altogether, it is not my place to decide what makes them happy or unhappy. I can never understand their reality, and they can never understand mine.