We are Finite

 it's easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, gone to Paris, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

it takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. it's not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you're all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. it's easy to regret, and keep regretting, forevermore, until our time runs out.

but it's not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. it's the regret itself. it's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

we can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. those lives are happening, it's true, but you're happening as well, and that's the happening we have to focus on.

of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. we don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. we don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. 

we just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. we're as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

we only need to be one person.

we only need to feel one existence.

we don't have to do everything in order to be everything, bcoz we're already infinite. while we're alive we always contain a future of various possibilities. 

so let's be kind to the people in our own existence. let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are bcoz, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.