What seems like a very long time ago, or perhaps not that long ago depending on how you look at it. I reached one of those very monumental turning points in my life. I was 19, fresh into university, and spending my summers working at the military base in my hometown. I wasn’t anything much, just a civilian secretary, but there was potential there. I was learning. Enough that in my second summer they offered me the position full time.
Full time. Complete full time stability, and a salary that looking back should have boggled my mind.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I’d taken that offer. I suspect I would have ended up a lifer with the military, would have ended up with a condo that was paid off, a car I could actually drive, probably a dog or maybe a cat. I would never have gone to England, never have finished university most likely, and most certainly never would have ended up where I am.
Obviously I didn’t take the job. I finished university, lived in England for nearly two years, and ended up here. Watching someone perform on stage that I dearly love, on a floating palace in the middle of the pacific. I have travelled the world more times than most people my age could ever imagine. I’ve fallen in love, out of love, the back in love again. I’ve touched the pyramids, hiked through Rome, waded in the river Jordan, read tarot cards in the shadow of Stonehenge. I’ve lived an incredible life. But a very very different one than could have come to me..
I never regret a single moment of any of it…but sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if I had taken that job, if I had chosen that road; where would I have journeyed, what would I have become?
Once, what seems like not so very long ago, two roads diverged …and I? I did take the one less travelled by, and that truly has made all the difference.