Regardless of where you are in Life’s journey, it always makes sense to follow your bliss and to remain true to yourself, feelings, beliefs, and values. Integrity and purpose will follow naturally. But always, I think, you must stay true to yourself and your essential inner child. That and take advantage of the unique, usually one-time opportunities Life offers, minimizing regrets.
In my own life, I took and always have taken Frost’s “The road less travelled by” rooted in instinct, intuition, and Nature. Like Frost, I, too, became a poet, but also a musician, music-lover, and performer, though I have always followed the Arts mainly via books, reading, literature, language, learning, music, theatre and plays, film, painting, and photography. These wide-ranging genres have been a bottomless source of learning, support, guidance, character development, and learning about myself, Life, and human nature.
I look back also and recognize the roles that destiny, character (as destiny), opportunities, choices, and dumb luck played in bringing me pleasure, knowledge, understandings, wisdom, and appreciations. Underneath it all, is an acceptance of self, others, and process.
I don’t care much for the times, the dumbing down, stupidity, wallowing in ignorance, the limited lives and choices of others, the agendas, social media bullying, and the total abandonment of authority (in any form), common sense, and tried and true processes or institutions. Increasingly, people have turned their backs on the past (except to sue) and have made Mammon their god in the nonstop pursuit of money and slavery to this obsession.
I remain a child of the more imaginative, caring, civil, and thoughtful 1950s and 1960s. (Once you’ve acquired the central values and truths of your life, it is hard to turn your back on them and just dumb down to hand-held screens as your raison d’etre.) Looking back, I’m glad I had as many opportunities, experiences and successes that I’ve had.
After retirement, I went steadily more ‘within’ and have never regretted any of the choices I made. To others, I say “Tend to your soul and the rest will take care of itself. You will eventually come to know yourself, to understand your life, and to appreciate the many positives you have already experienced.”
There are always many possibilities even in limited/limiting contexts, wrote Viktor Frankl. You always decide which ones on your palette to facilitate, to make reality. In that way, you create your own life, fate, and everything else, inside or outside yourself.