📿 Life Choices and Alternate Paths

How I ended up with weekends full of bounce-houses

Mass (1931)Franz Wilhelm Seiwert

We were extremely social this past weekend. At this point, I’ve found that many of our friends are transplants—New Yorkers who moved upstate sometime in the last decade. Given our shared roots, conversations often circle back to the same questions: What made you move upstate? How did you transition your career? Why this small town instead of the “big city” down the road?

Adreanna and I have made a series of choices as a couple—choices we might not have made if we were two single people navigating the world independently. We chose to move out of New York City in 2019 and then, shortly thereafter, chose to move from in-person meditation teaching to primarily online (right before the pandemic; good timing on that choice). Later, we made a choice to double down on upstate living and move to that small town and get a very old house…which means we are constantly making choices on what we need to fix up next. Then we made a choice to have a child, which means we unknowingly chose to spend the next decade attending birthday parties that inevitably feature bounce-houses.

I don’t begrudge any of these choices. Bounce-houses are fun! I don’t think I would change a thing, in particular the whole daughter of it all. But I do, from time to time, engage in a healthy evaluation of the bed I have made for myself and thus have to sleep in.

I reflect on the major inflection points and, being a comic book fan, often imagine the alternate universes where we made different choices. For example: when we first applied for a mortgage for our house, the bank turned us down because we’re independent contractors. Frustrated and saddened that we were going to lose our house we thought, “Should we just move to New Orleans?” The next bank swiftly approved us and we moved into our current home, but I imagine there are many universes out there where we gave up and are spending our weekends sans bounce-houses lounging instead at jazz brunches.

Again, I love the bed we have made for ourselves. We have a nice work-life balance and get to spend lots of time with our kiddo. We live somewhere beautiful with fresh food constantly available to us. We have developed a really lovely community here.

I had a particularly sweet moment last weekend with one member of that community, Bob. While we stood on the back deck, he told me he’d taken time off work to attend his daughter’s summer camp theater performance. Not a big end-of-year recital. Just a camp show. But Bob’s a chef, and he knows how easily the grind of the kitchen can become your whole life. “I’m just glad I’ve made choices that let me do that,” he said.

It reminded me of a moment in the comic Invincible, where the hero, after a decade of saving the world, is given the chance to return to the beginning and do it all over again—with full knowledge of what’s to come. He could undo some of the greatest tragedies not just in his life but in the world, stopping villains before they kill thousands of people.

He asks a question you never see in comics - an incredibly human question - “But does that mean we won’t have my daughter?” The powers-that-be are mystified. “Not if you radically change the past, no. But you could save all of those people.” Without missing a beat he says “No, thank you.”

As a father, I get it. About once a week I think about other inflection points in my past - in my twenties in particular - where if I could go back and whisper in my younger self’s ear I could save myself and others heartbreak and pain. And yet? Without my tragedies and mistakes I wouldn’t be where I am now, evaluating this bed full of bounce-houses.

What I’ve learned from these reflections is simple: those kinds of ruminations aren’t helpful. I can’t change the past. And even if I could—would I, if it meant I didn’t get this life? If it meant we didn’t have Ruby? No, thank you.

So this brings me to a different type of choice: the choices I make everyday in my own mind.

For example:

I can choose to dwell on a past that I can’t change or I can choose to drop those stories and show up for the people in front of me

I can choose to dwell on that stupid thing I said at that bounce-house party or I can choose to focus on the warm feeling of friendship that I walked away with

I can choose to worry about navigating the work and social commitments that are stacked one on top of another this week or I can meet each one with a sense of fresh energy

In each of these, there’s a simple through-line: am I willing to let go of the stories in my head or not?

Ländliche Familie (Familie Jatho, 1923) Franz Wilhelm Seiwert

To state the obvious, our lives are made up of choices. And I’m aware that even being able to say that is a kind of luxury. Some of us—myself included—live with a fair amount of privilege. I get to make decisions about where I live, how I work, what kind of parties I attend on the weekends. Meanwhile, others—refugees in Gaza, migrants crossing borders, families displaced by violence, climate collapse, or economic hardship—are simply trying to survive. For them, “choice” often isn’t part of the vocabulary in the same way.

This awareness doesn’t invalidate the choices I’ve made or the reflections I have about them, but it does create context. It reminds me to hold my life with humility. It pushes me to stay attuned to the suffering of others and to recognize the moral responsibility that comes with relative stability. I don’t want to turn away from joy, but I don’t want to look away from suffering either.

If anything, this awareness deepens my gratitude. The fact that I even get to pause and wonder about the bed I’ve made—rather than just trying to find a place to lay my head—is its own form of grace.

Also, what I’ve found, for some of us, is that internal choices often shape the external ones. When I make those inner choices to let go of my stories and be more present in my body, more available to the world, I find that the ways I engage with myself and others is more holistic, more skillful and overall kinder. When I indulge the stories in my head, particularly ruminating on the corners of the bed that are unkempt or torn up, I isolate, shut down, and miss out on life’s simple joys.

As I watched Ruby get bounced around by other children in this massive inflatable, smiling at me as if it was the coolest thing in the world, I felt it in my bones: all the choices, even the painful ones, were worth it—because they brought me here.