I was listening to  a podcast called Dear Sugars.  It's a relationship podcast.  One of the hosts is Cheryl Strayer.  The movie "Wild" was inspired from her book.  She's a beautiful writer.  Anyway, in the episode they are talking about a woman who was at a crossroads in her life and was having difficulty making a decision.  Cheryl's  response to her was to look at her blogpost.  So off I went.  I was inspired by her response to a man who was in a similar predicament.  What she wrote was in the context of whether to have more children or not.  But, as a therapist I often come across many people who are at a crossroad and ambivalent about which path to follow.  Typically we suggest doing the traditional "to be or not to be" question by creating a pros and cons list. Her advise here went a step further to talk about how to accept and let go of the road not traveled.  I cut down her post and took out the part about children and distilled it to the most inspiring that can be generalized to anyone who is at a crossroads.

The link is to the full blog.
DEAR SUGAR, THE RUMPUS ADVICE COLUMN #71: THE GHOST SHIP THAT DIDN’T CARRY US

https://therumpus.net/2011/04/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-71-the-ghost-ship-that-didnt-carry-us/

"There’s a poem I love by Tomas Tranströmer called “The Blue House.” I think of it every time I ponder questions about the irrevocable choices we make. The poem is narrated by a man who is standing in the woods near his house. When he looks at his house from this vantage point, he observes that it’s “as if I had just died and was seeing the house from a new angle.” It’s a wonderful image—that man among the trees—and it’s an instructive one too. There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective. It’s in this stance that Tranströmer’s narrator is capable of seeing his life for what it is while also acknowledging the lives he might have had. “The sketches,” Tranströmer writes, “all of them, want to become real.” The poem strikes a chord in me because it’s so very sadly and joyfully and devastatingly true. Every life, Tranströmer writes, “has a sister ship,” one that follows “quite another route” than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.

[Instead of weighing what you know about your choices, make a list of... ] What don’t you know? Write down everything you don’t know about your future life—which is everything, of course—but use your imagination. What are the thoughts and images that come to mind when you picture yourself at twice the age you are now? 

Write on a big piece of paper: What is a good life? Write “good life” and list everything that you associate with a good life then rank them in order of importance. Have the most meaningful things in your life come to you as a result of ease or struggle? What scares you about sacrifice? What scares you about not sacrificing?

So there you are on the floor, your gigantic white piece of paper with things written all over it like a ship’s sail, and maybe you don’t have clarity still, maybe you don’t know what to do, but you feel something, don’t you? The sketches of your real life and your sister life are right there before you and you get to decide what to do. One is the life you’ll have, the other is the one you won’t. Switch them around in your head and see how it feels. Which affects you on a visceral level? Which won’t let you go? Which is ruled by fear? Which is ruled by desire? Which makes you want to close your eyes and jump and which makes you want to turn and run?

You will never know of the life you don’t choose. You’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not yours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry you. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore."