“Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.”

Stephen Levine

Could have been. That’s a painful phrase, so full of connotations. We hear it often from people who think they wasted their lives, sold themselves short, and now lack the time or opportunity to change — or think they do. We also hear from ourselves. I certainly understand the feeling. I am no stranger to rumination about the past or the future.

Being in the present moment is one of the most difficult places to be.

Having given up on a dream I had held most of my life, pursued most of my life, I am forced to confront this very human wound. Almost every single day I have thoughts about how I could have been that person, and it stings even more when I project myself into the future. In five years, ten, twenty… what could I have been?

It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? We can’t change the past. The future is an unknown we can barely control if at all. Yet the mind, in its infinite capacity to make something out of nothing, weaves an entire life of possibilities that never happened and then treats them as certainties that would have happened.

In ruminating about the past and the future, we rob ourselves of the present — a one-sided exchange that garners only fruitless fantasies.

I think we all logically know the futility of pondering what could have been. Yet emotionally it has sharp, deep hooks. It’s a process, learning to let go, and an even longer process learning to move on. Even then, a scar remains. We carry its ghost all our lives.

Yet it’s impossible to not be a could-have-been person. No matter what we choose to be in life, it will always come at the expense of all the other things we could have done. Everyone faces an array of possible roads, and most of them are mutually exclusive. You get one shot. If we were all immortal, it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t do something — we could always get around to it later. Not so with us. As full as life may be, just as much must be left along the wayside.

To live one life, you need to condemn many others.

Yet to try to live all of them keeps you stuck, forever.

If find this excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s book, The Bell Jar, a brilliant example of crossroads between life’s infinite possibilities and the necessary sacrifice of choice:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America . . . and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

Living in fear of could-have-beens is paralyzing. At some point, we have to choose. At some point, we have to let the other figs wrinkle and fall away. That is the inevitable sacrifice of becoming.

So instead of trying to avoid the pain of what could have been, make peace with it, and focus on becoming something, on learning who you really are. It’s imperfect. It’s meandering. It’s never guaranteed. But sometimes we have to let go of great things in order to discover who we truly are. And in the final analysis, no matter what you could have been, what matters is what you are. Not by someone else’s measuring stick. Surely not by society’s fickle standards. But your own.

Are you happy with yourself?

Are you able to give yourself permission for that?

And are you willing to graciously forgive yourself for not being all the things you once wanted to be?

We are only here for a short time. Life doesn’t wait for us to start living — life has, and always will, go on. We must go on, too. Make peace with the ghosts of all those things left undone. Most of all, make peace with yourself, and embrace life as it is: imperfect, unpredictable, rarely what we imagined it would be like, but life nonetheless. Beautiful, precious life.