This is in continuation of my previous post on the topic of
”Limiting vs widening our perspectives.”

What if?

What if? These are two words that I use to question my perspectives. And when I ask myself these questions, it helps me ponder on how life could have been (for better or worse) than what I have really experienced so far.

I have asked myself a variety of questions to look at life from different perspectives…

• What if I was born 25 years earlier? What if I was born 25 years later?

• What if I was born 100 years earlier? What if I was born 1000 years earlier?

• What if I had a different set of parents?

• What if I was born in a different country? (Imagine any country)

• What if I was born in my neighbor’s house. My current neighbor, my past neighbors? Neighbor to the left of me, right of me, in front of our house?

• What if?…, What if?…, What if?…

When one asks questions like these, we realize that so many decisions have been taken for us. And several of these decisions have set the environmental context that engineered us to be who we were, are, and will be - yesterday, today, and certainly tomorrow. But one does have an opportunity to re-engineer oneself - if only one steps back to remove the blinders that make us react, question every aspect of what has engineered us to be who one is today, and deliberately set about to be who one wants to be, at least in a few key aspects of one’s life.

But, all said and done, I have no regrets about what I have experienced in life. And, I would not have wanted to experience it any other way than it played out. It is a blessing to be able to question oneself and see nakedly who you are and work every day to engineer some deliberate choices in this hugely environmentally driven life.

What kind of questions do you ask yourself to gain differing and varying perspectives this lifetime?

Title photo credit: Gary Butterfield on Unsplash