How The Little Decisions Can Change The Trajectory Of Your Life

Last updated on 11 December 2021

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Do you ever wonder about the little decisions you make in life?

Not perhaps one such as turning left instead of right and going to the completely other direction, or taking this job instead of that one, or having another baby or taking that holiday. The little decisions.

The small things, like having tea instead of coffee one day, or stopping to tuck a shoelace back into place and therefore delaying your journey by a mere few seconds. Do these little things make any difference to our day to day lives? Our lives altogether?

Sometimes I just wonder. I wonder if had had coffee that day at my friend’s place, instead of tea, perhaps she would have an extra tea bag for later in her day, or later in the week when someone else came around and there was only 1 tea bag left. If I had used that tea bag up when I was there, then that person couldn’t have tea. Perhaps they’d have coffee instead, even though they’d already had 4 that day. Perhaps they wouldn’t sleep that night, and they’d thrash around, and get up the next morning even more tired. Perhaps that would affect their day, their job, their relationships. All because I chose to have tea that day and use up that teabag.

How different would life have been if I had left the house a minute earlier, and missed that chance encounter with a friend as soon as I stepped out my door?

I wouldn’t have ended up walking to wherever we were going with them, wouldn’t have had that conversation that lasted longer than just the walk. Perhaps our friendship would not have grown as much because we didn’t have that half-hour of great catch up walking down the road. Maybe that was the start of a great friendship that would last the years … perhaps we would have drifted apart if it never happened, and only in our elderly years think back to that time that we had a friend called So-and-So and ‘whatever happened to them’?

If that book wasn’t there at the library that day because the person returning it was running 1 minute late, and I picked up another one I hadn’t heard of … would that book have been the one that would change the way I thought about things, thought about the world, or change the way I saw others, saw myself? Would that book have been the one that lit a fire in me to go on and do great things? Or would it have been the downfall of my love of reading, have led me to fall out of love of the written word, never to read again?

Though perhaps if I hadn’t picked up that snail from the footpath, in my attempts to save it getting crushed by rushing feet, a small child may have seen it and became so fascinated by the creature that they decided then and there to become a zoologist, a biologist, a zookeeper. Perhaps they’d go on to win prices for animal kingdom discoveries, or find the cure to incurable diseases from inside the shells of snails. Perhaps highly improbable, but you never know.

And while I don’t think it is at all healthy to think like this all the time – forever questioning every single thing you do, not really living but forever asking ‘what if’ –  it is interesting to stop sometimes and just wonder. Would life really have been different for me, for my friends and those around me, for you, if our little decisions made a big impact? Would it have been so different if I had had coffee instead of tea?

Do you ever wonder about the little decisions?

Original image from here.