The Cost of Opportunity

This period of time - the last week of the year between Christmas and New Year's - has become for me a time of reflection, a time to reconsider possibilities and plans for the coming year. It's made only more critical -and more poignant - by the fact that we only return to Old Home on a periodic basis now.

Looking through the prism of the preceding 11 months and indeed the preceding years, one begins to more completely and fully question the decisions that brought me here. Every decision presupposes that we didn't make another one; our whole lives become the compilation of the Roads We Did Travel instead of the Roads We Did Not.

It burdens me more this year, I suppose, as I return to Old Home and find others starting to do activities at The Ranch that I had always dreamed of: my father putting in a real garden; their horse renter running electric wire to raise a couple of steers; my father talking about trying to raise some geese this year. I, on the other hand, find myself farther and farther away from any of this, trying to content myself with a 8 ft. circular garden, immersed in the workings of an industry I don't really care for in a place far from Home.

It's then that one starts looking at the decisions that brought one here. There are plenty of them.

Should I have changed schools and majors when I did? Should I have gone to the other school I did? Should I have married my sweetheart? Should I have chosen the major I did, taken the career path I did, moved where I moved? Should I have played the harp more professionally, self-published the book I never did, gone to work for The Firm or have gone back to where I am now instead of sticking a little bit harder with The Firm?

Questions, always questions - "Riddles in the Dark" as Gollum would say.

But in a sense, to review these items is to miss the larger question: what is the goal to which you were heading? Not the goal that you self proclaimed or believed, but the real goal - your heart goal, the one that has subconsciously been driving your decisions.

I'm coming to believe that within each of us is this heart goal: this one thing that our heart is driving towards, consciously or unconsciously. To the extent that we drown it out with the goals that we think we want or that others choose for us, to this extent we will continue to wander, making a series of seemingly unconnected choices, tacking this way and then that against the winds of Life without ever making progress. To the extent that we identify this goal, that we discard all lesser goals, that we remain true to ourselves and not to what those around us tell us, to this extent the cost of opportunity becomes less to ourselves because we are working on those items of greater import not less.

So instead of asking the typical questions about the cost of opportunity in terms of this versus that, perhaps we need to take a deeper and more encompassing view: does this move me closer to my heart's desire, or farther away? Jobs and titles, perhaps even relationships and activities will fade in importance as we realize that at every turn, we failed to move towards the one great cry of our heart.