Hi Friends,
As you know, I just started writing my next book. And last week, I finally had to admit that I couldn’t keep up with all my other commitments, while giving the book the time and mental space it deserves. I made the decision to email every podcast host who had invited me as a guest over the next three months to cancel, explaining why.*
A few days later, a fellow author invited me to an incredible event in San Francisco – the kind of invitation I would normally say yes to in a heartbeat. But I decided to stay in London and spend more time with my family. Again, a choice between two experiences I genuinely want.
This morning, journaling about friendships I’d love to deepen, hobbies I’d like to explore, and all the corners of the world I’m curious about, I was overcome by what I can only describe as grief for all the versions of myself I will never get to be.
I noticed how much resistance this brought up in me: the urge to keep every door open, squeeze more into each day, and somehow escape the reality that time only moves in one direction. When you’re endlessly curious, the physical limitation of having just one life can feel almost unbearable.
It turns out that people have been wrestling with this for thousands of years. In The Republic, Plato tells a myth in which souls are presented with an assortment of possible lives but must choose just one: “Whoever draws the first lot must choose first the life that will then be his.” All those lives laid out before us, and only one that we actually get to incarnate.
More recently, Oliver Burkeman argued that every decision necessarily sacrifices countless alternative paths, describing even the best imaginable life as a process of “ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.”
Kate Bowler expresses this beautifully in No Cure for Being Human, describing how we can lose a thousand imagined futures over the course of a single life. These losses don’t necessarily mean we’ve made bad decisions. We can be deeply happy with the life we’ve chosen and still mourn the lives we haven’t lived.
Psychologists actually found that our most enduring regrets often concern the gap between who we are and who we ideally wanted to be. And maybe the resistance I’m experiencing isn’t just fear of missing out, but the recognition that some of my imagined selves would have to remain imaginary.
So, what do we do with this?
First, embrace the grief. I don’t think every uncomfortable emotion is a problem to be solved. Sometimes sadness is simply an appropriate response to something true. We can acknowledge that we’re giving up meaningful possibilities without interpreting that sadness as evidence that we’re making the wrong choice. In fact, maybe the grief is proof that there were many beautiful paths available to us.
Second, develop a spiritual practice. By this, I don’t necessarily mean religion. I mean cultivating a relationship with something larger than our individual ambitions and daily plans. Meditation, prayer, contemplation, or time spent quietly in nature can help us shift from constantly asking what else we could be doing to appreciating what is already here.
Third, keep experimenting. Accepting our limits doesn’t mean becoming less curious. We might not have enough time to become a professional musician, but we can still take a few piano lessons. We might not move to another country, but we can spend a week experiencing life there. You can run tiny experiments to make space for your curiosity without turning every interest into a new identity, career or lifelong obligation.
The promise that we can be anything we want is misleading, not because we aren’t capable of extraordinary things, but because we can only live one life at a time. Every yes is also a no. Every path chosen leaves others unexplored. And perhaps a fulfilling life isn’t one in which we manage to experience every possibility, but one in which we learn to love the particular life we’re creating, while making peace with all the others we will never know.
*I was nervous about doing this, but they all came back saying they understood and wished me luck!