What if...?

Well...what else can follow "if only" but "what if"? This short but profound question honestly haunts me, and challenges my already over-thinking brain on a minute to minute basis. I look at myself, my children, my life, my career...I take a step back and really LOOK at the journey I am on. How have I gotten here...and where I am going?

What if I hadn't packed up a car and moved to Florida 15 years ago? What if I had allowed fear of flying to keep me from boarding a plane to Paris? What if I kept my heart hidden from the world?

"What if" plays on all our fears...plays on our anxieties...and ultimately plays on our guarded hearts. We have all made bad decisions...none of us are perfect. What if I woke up everyday and decided TODAY IS THE DAY? Leaving all the fears, the regrets, the hurts behind...

Memories and oh-so-real images run through our minds like freight trains in the night...rolling past sleeping cities on worn railroad tracks...leaving us tired to the point of defeat. What if we bundle all of the bad choices and regrets together, cast them away and press on?

What if we choose to leave everything out on the field everyday? Each day being a sudden death playoff game...do it now or don't do it all. What if we choose the rocky unknown path in instead of the easy way out? What if...?

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost