25 July 2026
In primary school I had a friend I got on with wonderfully. I went to a different high school than he did and the contact broke off. From one day to the next, we landed on different paths of life, in different realities. I spent high school alone, among people I only mildly liked. For a long time I thought of it as a lost chance. Today I see it differently. At that crossroads it was not so much that something closed, as that someone began, me, the present one, with that loneliness, with the conversations that never happened, and with the person all of it made me. The other variant never came to life, so there is no one for me to miss. There is no road to it, because the road went as me. And that is good.
Because it is not the choice itself that is irreversible. You will go to a different university later, you will change your job, your city, your person, most doors swing both ways, you will come back, even if at a higher price. What is irreversible is the person you would have become on the other side. Those particular studies you will no longer live through at eighteen, with that look on the world, with those people, in that time, because time does not come back. So it is not about where you arrive, but who you become along the way. We usually think of life as a player collecting points. But here the player himself changes along the way.
Life does not run in a single line, it branches at every step. You hold in your head a blurred image of the future you want to be in, and you walk toward it. Most everyday choices are small steps, each nudges you a little this way or that, but none decides, because you can step back from each one. Over the direction you have some power, over the rest none. Fate will throw in something you did not foresee anyway, so you have to be humble toward what comes out, and sure of which way you are going. And when something carries you off course, one honest question remains, how much was my mistake and how much plain bad luck, and you answer it only to yourself, honestly, because no one else will split that for you.
You will not reach everything, by the way. Part of life is simply out of range, because there is not enough time, not the conditions, or the chance is zero. Someone born without legs will not become an Olympic sprinter, and that is not a matter of effort but of a hard limit. You move within what is really reachable from the place where you stand.
And not every branching weighs the same. That time does not come back is common to everything, so by irreversibility alone you measure nothing. You measure by how strongly a given crossroads changes who you become. An important crossroads you recognize even before you step onto it, by the fact that a second real road stands beside it, one you truly could take right now, and that each of them would lead you in a clearly different direction, to different people, different places, a different self. A small, everyday choice does not do this, it does not reset who you are. But studies, a profession, a city, a person, those do. At ones like these you slow down, not because you know which option is better, since you do not and will not, but so as not to pass through them mindlessly. You give them as much attention as your reason and your preferences can afford.
Apart from these stand the crossroads you do not want to touch at all. From most of the places you fall into, you will dig yourself out somehow. But there are ones you do not come back from, death, permanent disability, bottomless ruin. These you do not weigh like the rest, because they do not make you into a different person, they end the becoming of anyone at all. They do not cut off a piece of the road, they cut off the whole of it. At these the only question is whether you go on at all.
You go through life once. There is no second attempt and no backup version, there is only this one road you actually live. With a cool head you set the direction and watch for those important crossroads before you step onto them, and then you simply live what there is, without constant settling of accounts. The branches left behind you, you will not visit, and you do not know if they were better anyway. And you are not the sum of the roads you did not take, because those are infinitely many, if they all shaped you, you would be no one in particular. You are what the one you did take made of you. When some abandoned one catches up with you now and then, feel it and go on. I am at some one point and I imagine the next. I do not know if I will get there. I know which way I am going, that I go this way once, and that it is this road that makes me into who I will be.