Choose your pain

I was once told, there are two pains in life and you must choose one.

The pain of discipline, or the pain of regret.

It reminds me that we always have a choice. Also, that there are two sides to every choice: there’s the path you choose and the one you miss out on.

Sometimes there’s the preverbial fork in the road. Your current path ends and you have to choose a new direction. Those are hard, because from that point, sometimes they both look a bit the same. Neither is obviously better. You just have to find a way to pick one and move on.

But the harder ones, I think, are the freeway exits. The ones where there’s an option to stay on the current path. Or you can decide to take a hard left. To exit.

I guess sometimes, the current path is lousy, so you’ll take any exit. Other times, you’re just so fixated on moving ahead, you don’t even notice those other options when they show up.

Either way, these freeway exits, if we continue calling them that, are the tricky ones. With the fork situation, it’s like you don’t choose change, you have to accept it and try to pick the best option. But with the freeway exit, it’s in your hands. You can choose to do nothing, and nothing will change. Or you can choose change.

Change isn’t necessarily right or wrong, but it is a choice. The thing is, choosing to have one, is also choosing to miss out on the other. Either way, you miss out.

And that takes me back to this idea of the two pains. You can’t say it’s always better to take the exit and you can’t say it’s always better to ignore it. But either way it’s a choice between discipline and regret. Because in the end you’ll either get to your planned destination, or you won’t.

The pain of discipline is reaching your goal and reflecting on the fun detour you missed along the way. The pain of regret is waking up the night after the fun detour and realising you’ve missed your chance.