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Choice Points in Life

Life's Signal Markers

By John WhyePublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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Choice Points in Life
Photo by Letizia Bordoni on Unsplash

Now that I am retired I can look back on my life with the perspective I never could when I was caught up in the mix, the hustle and bustle of the work world, the joys and difficulties of child-raising. The constant struggle to improve myself and my life situation, and the never-ending battle for sheer survival have mostly sorted themselves out now.

“I can see clearly now, the rain is gone, I can see all obstacles in my way,” like the old Johnny Nash song says. I can see all the choices that I made and all the ones that I wish I had made. I can see when and why I made them, and what the eventual results of each and every choice turned out to be.

It’s true, I cannot predict what would have happened if I had taken another choice, but like Yogi Berra, the old Yankee’s catcher once famously remarked: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I think that life is made up of what I like to call a series of choice points, or as Robert Frost the famous poet once said:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

I once wrote a line in one of my songs: “I wish that I could have seen the future back then, as clearly as I see the past right now.” It’s like that old saying, everybody has 20–20 hindsight.

When we are young and caught up in the world of books and schools, with mandatory education starting in kindergarten and progressing through grade school and junior high, most young Americans today press on and graduate from high school. Those that can’t make it this far and drop out of high school are pretty much doomed to a lifetime of low-paying dead-end jobs.

The majority do graduate high school though and are then faced with the first real major choice point of their lives. Should they get a job and start making money right now, or should they go to college and get a degree so they can earn more money down the line?

For many of course, this is not an option at all. Economic necessity usually takes this option or choice point right out of our hands. If you are a pregnant woman or already have a kid, you really have little choice but to plunge into the labor market.

If you are lucky, your husband, boyfriend, or life partner is still with you and will contribute their fair share of work and support, but again this is not always the case. Unfortunately “deadbeat dads” is a phrase that has become part of the general vocabulary.

But even if you are not a pregnant woman, even if you are a single male, again economic necessity usually dictates this choice. College is not for everyone anyway, and getting a college degree is no sure ticket to making more money, but statistically, it does help over the course of a lifetime.

This is because, with a college degree, you generally have a better-paying range of jobs to pick and choose from once you do enter the labor force. Many people these days, and I don’t know where they find the energy, manage to combine both working a day job to pay the rent and still taking classes at night or online in the meantime.

There are abundant school loan programs out there, although these are also fraught with hidden dangers when the time comes to pay them back. In fact, the whole student loan program has become a real disgrace, a national nightmare that is reaching epidemic proportions.

There have been scandalous and abusive pitfalls connected with these student loans that were kept well hidden by the lenders at the time. Exorbitant interest rates and thuggish attempts at collection activity have caused many students to wish they had never gone that route.

Another choice point around the time you graduate (or don’t) from high school is something we are all hard-wired to do: The urge to merge, the fundamental biological drive to procreate to ensure the propagation of the species.

This is a natural fact and cannot be denied or even argued. It is nature’s way of ensuring the continuation of the human race, and the hormones in young people are always surging wildly through their bodies.

Of course, the selection of a potential mate is perhaps the most fundamental choice point of all. For most young women, you really want to meet Mr. Right, but you usually have to go through a natural selection, a weeding out process, of all the Mr. Right Nows. To discard the ones who seemed great choices at the time but didn’t have the staying power or moral fiber to make a lasting commitment.

Lesbian, gay, and transgender people now have not only the right to marry but also the responsibility of raising children of their own. If they desire to raise a family and let’s face it, most people do want a family no matter what, their sexual orientation is irrelevant.

Many couples, straight, gay, lesbian, or transgender skip the legal marriage part altogether anyway. There are more people living together out of wedlock now than ever before.

Because while getting married is relatively an easy thing to do, getting divorced is extremely difficult. When there are children and property issues involved, legal divorce can be and usually is insanely complicated.

So to sum up, most Americans graduate from high school, hook up with somebody and then either go to work, go to college or somehow combine work and further education “Then what?” To be continued in Part 2.

Things can only get better…Cant they?

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About the Creator

John Whye

Retired hippie blogger, Bay Area sports enthusiast, Pisces, music lover, songwriter...

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