If I could do it all over again

What would you change if you could do it all over again? I will tell you what.

I would have been a more deliberate and disciplined student in life. What went wrong with that? I think it had to do with having so much fun and not having to think about not doing that.

When you start off in life with so much goodness and abundance, and when you don’t experience deprivation and suffering, maybe a person takes the good life for granted. Some call that being “spoiled”. It is not that Mom and Dad did not suffer because they truly did. However, they worked extremely hard so that I didn’t have to experience that.

So, I laughed and had a good time, and took good life for granted. That was a start.

When it came time to hunker down to study, that was work and hard. It meant giving up having fun to be diligent about learning. It wasn’t learning that was the obstacle as I enjoyed that, it was the manner in which to go about it.

Learning requires focus and devotion. It requires sacrifice. Learning can be fun, but it is often difficult and challenging. It is a distraction from free-wheeling fun. So, that is not fun.

If I could do it all over again, I would have less fun and more learning.

If I could do it all over again, I would want to find the same love in my life. There can be no better. If I could do it all over again, I would work harder to earn her love and devotion.

If I could do it all over again, I would have become a professional at something people depend upon. I would not be an accountant or a lawyer. I might have wanted to be a medical doctor, for instance. Yet, given who I am, I would have been better at being a farmer.

Then again, if I had been a farmer, I would not have discovered the love in my life. I would be growing strawberries like my ancestors instead in some remote patch of land in some desolate place where I would have been a poor reader and terrible student.

I would probably have been a simple person, working hard, and not having much fun. I would not want to repeat that experience and so for my ancestors’ sake, I didn’t.