Happy October - Bunny Bunny

Join me inside to unlock a year's worth of yoga, art, workouts, dance and more. See you there. Let's make Autumn warm and cozy together.

I have lived enough different versions of myself now to know that life rarely looks the way we once imagined it would.

I have moved countries. Changed direction. Worked in completely different worlds. Built things without knowing where they would lead. Started again when it would have been easier to stay comfortable. I have been an athlete, a mother, a creator, a coach, a consultant, a student again when I was already supposed to know what I was doing. There are parts of my life that make perfect sense looking backwards and others that still don't.

And still, I sometimes catch myself thinking about the lives I didn't live.

What if I had chosen one career and stayed with it? What if I had studied something different when I was younger? What if I had known then what I know now? What if I had taken one opportunity and ignored another? What if I had been more confident before I had enough experience to understand why confidence mattered?

We can spend an extraordinary amount of our actual life negotiating with imaginary versions of it.

The strange thing about getting older is that the possibilities don't disappear, but you become increasingly aware that you cannot choose all of them.

Every yes quietly contains a no.

Move somewhere and you leave somewhere else. Choose one person and you don't choose another. Give years to one kind of work and those same years cannot belong to something else. Become deeply invested in one part of your life and inevitably there will be another part that receives less of you.

Perhaps that is why regret can become so seductive. It lets us pretend there was a version in which we somehow chose everything.

There wasn't.

I think about this because curiosity has always been one of the strongest forces in my life. I still want to learn things. I still want to travel. I still want to make things. I still want to understand my body and what it is capable of. I still want to meet people who make me think differently. I still get excited by an idea and wonder what would happen if I followed it.

For a long time, I thought this meant I hadn't quite figured out who I was.

Now I wonder whether it means the opposite.

Maybe a life doesn't have to become narrower as we get older. Maybe knowing ourselves isn't finally arriving at one fixed identity and defending it for the rest of our lives.

I have never only been one thing.

Most of us haven't.

We are different with our children than we are with our friends. Different at twenty than at forty. Different when we are strong than when life knocks some of that certainty out of us. We can love the person we have become and still miss somebody we used to be. We can be grateful for where we are and still wonder about somewhere else.

Those things don't cancel each other out.

I think that matters, because there is enormous pressure to turn a life into a coherent story. To make every choice look intentional. To explain how everything led perfectly to everything else.

Mine hasn't.

Some of the most important parts came from curiosity. Some came from accidents. Some came from choices I was certain about. Others came from having absolutely no idea what I was doing and moving anyway.

And perhaps that is why I am becoming less interested in asking whether I have lived the right life.

There is no way to answer it.

There are only lives we lived and lives we imagined.

I cannot know what would have happened if I had stayed instead of left, chosen differently, started earlier, waited longer, worried less or been braver. I can create an entire alternative life in my head, but I will always be writing it with the knowledge of the person I became by not living it.

That seems worth remembering.

Because I don't want to reach the end of my life having spent so much time examining the doors behind me that I forgot there were still doors in front of me.

I am not finished learning.

I am not finished changing.

I am not finished travelling, creating, moving, loving, getting things wrong, discovering things I didn't know I cared about, meeting people I don't yet know exist or becoming versions of myself I couldn't possibly imagine from where I am standing now.

There are still things I want very badly.

But wanting more from life does not require me to believe I chose the wrong one.

Perhaps that is one of the things age is slowly teaching me.

You don't have to become every person you could have been.

You just have to remain curious about the person you could still become.