You Can Have Anything You Want

In Jewish weddings, a glass is smashed.

In its most mystical sense, this is to say: every moment of joy also contains sadness.

Similarly, every choice contains unchoice. To choose something, by definition, means to unchoose other options. (You could preserve freedom indefinitely of course, but that limbo contains its own kind of sadness). It could be as trivial as a chocolate bar, or as significant as a life partner. Where to live, what to do for a living, how to spend your day. Choice funnels. You can’t have it all.

Sad that it took me a long time to realise this, because I realised a source of unhappiness was the cumulative weight of all the things that didn’t happen. The things that were missed, forgotten, the choices that ruled out other possibilities, the parts of myself I no longer am (and miss) or get to be (and wish I still could be).

I never got famous young, never rebelled in quite the way I wanted, didn’t invest wisely, didn’t buy the right house; I see friends and strangers all the time who took a different path and wonder if I made the right choices. Sometimes that’s energising, to associate with people free in different ways. In other moments it feels like a provocation.

That doesn’t denigrate the life I’ve built: it is full of richness and beauty; I appreciate its journey and all its future possibilities.

Actors say that an emotion fully processed moves through the body in ninety seconds. It’s only if it gets caught up that it lingers, and can stay in your system for years. Because I was unable to rapidly process and fully accept every movement of my life at the time, the unchoices grew. They become a spectre, a ghostly weight of what wasn’t. And for me, at least, that unlived life needs to be grieved. Not the individual parts, those too I suppose, but the whole unlived life itself. All the things I’m not and wasn’t, all the things that are no longer. All the things that never were.

The French say, “it is the fate of glass to break”.

Maybe the cost of a happy life is its grief.

And maturity is to be able to accept the bittersweetness of lost opportunity.

Having noticed this, now I can commit fully to my own reality. Instead of being tantalised by fantasy. I feel more able to build starting from what is right in front of me. Life used to be a movie, in a way; now it’s more like a documentary. Gonzo magic realism. Dogme without all the fucking.

Radically committing to the life I’m in allows me to move with more openness and commit more deeply to every choice, however temporary, knowing that it is inevitable for choice and unchoice to go hand in hand.

No matter how many possibilities you perceive, and there are so many, they will always outnumber the possible reality.

You can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything.