Advice: You Can't Go Wrong

Very happy to be reconvening with my fellow expat blog challengers for the first of our monthly writing prompts. For March, the topic is "advice." 

Decision made. Onward!

I have an unproductive habit of sometimes letting my mind wander over the past - What-iffing. It's not a melancholy thing, just a curiosity  to play out imagined outcomes of taking the other fork in the road at pivotal moments in my life. What if I had gone to that big state school instead of the tiny women's college? What if I had majored in Early Childhood Education like I was originally planning? What if I had accepted that full-ride assistantship in St Louis for grad school instead of deciding to pay full tuition to go to Brooklyn? What if I had turned down that Lit Manager job in Florida and stayed in New York, instead? What if I'd not answered Partner-in-Crime's email on an online dating site (I almost didn't!)?

What-iffing always leads me to the same place - if I'd done any of these things differently, I wouldn't have had the adventure of living overseas, I wouldn't be married to the best guy I've ever known, and I wouldn't have my Hushpuppy. So, though I may have faced some occasional hardships with the choices, I'm glad I made them. I'm not a fatalist: I don't believe there's "one person for everyone" or that things are "meant to be," so the exercise of What-iffing is interesting to me knowing that at any one of those forks, my life could be so different - different economic status, different lifestyle, different husband or no husband, a different kid brought into this world.

What-iffing often reminds me of the most important piece of advice I've ever received. Over sub sandwiches and life transition conversation one day, my friend Nick, who has a good 20 years more life experience than me, said something so simple to me, "there are no 'right' choices, there's only what you do with the choices you make."

Through the following years, this advice has been so freeing to me. I don't take it literally that there are no wrong choices. Breaking laws, hurting people, taking up smoking (I presume Hushpuppy will be able to read this blog one day) - those are wrong choices. There are people in this world who habitually make pretty terrible choices. But in the scope of regular life choices - this job or that job, to marry this person or not, to spend a lot of money on a dream vacation or save it for a rainy day, used or new car, oatmeal or toast - within these choices, you do the best you know how and then you move forward with a positive attitude and determination to make it work.

This is pretty solid advice to carry in your head, as an expat. I doubt there are many of us expats who haven't once thought, "why am I here?" or "I've made a huge mistake." What a powerful feeling if your next thought can be, "no, actually, there was no way to mess up the decision to move here or not. And now, I've decided to be here,that is valid, and what can I do with this decision?",

For me, this advice has been the most powerful in the throes of making a decision. Move to Australia or not? There's happiness, and at some point some pain, on either path off that choice. I'm a "go with my gut" person because I believe my gut is actually a pretty evolved part of me, sending its signals based on a lot of prior evidence and experiences. So, I do what my gut says, and release myself into the knowledge that I can't choose incorrectly, and that I'm in charge of doing something grand once I've chosen.