What if I hadn’t been applied to a job posting for an au pair in Paris when I was 19?
What if my host family there didn’t have a friend from the USA who was visiting London?
What if I had never introduced that friend to my brother?
What if they hadn’t got along?
What if they didn’t move to the USA several years later with their kids?
What if I had stayed in France?
What if my brother hadn’t worked with someone who’s cousin lived in Boston?
What if I hadn’t bothered to contact him?
What if I’d hadn’t dared to meet him on a blind date?
What if I didn’t say yes to his marriage proposal?
What if we had decided to live somewhere other than our town?
What if it hadn’t been a struggle to have kids?
What if …….?
Life is so full of what ifs. They blow my mind, quite literally. If any of these questions had a different answer, I would be living a different life altogether. But I believe in serendipity as well as in creating your own destiny. Every decision we make shapes the next. We make things happen, they don’t happen to us. This is my credo. What ifs are about looking over to your shoulder and marveling at the path that has brought you to today. I march forward, savoring one moment at a time.
