... go I !" - how many times have I thought this when looking at other people's lives! Never in envy but in surprise and, indeed, wonder that I should've come through it all in one piece.We can't live another life in parallel to find out what might've been had we not taken the road less travelled, but we can look at the lives of friends who kept us company from afar while we made our own little detours.
Friends such as my old school-mate Ulrich who's never even left his hometown, learnt his trade there, married, had kids, and only in recent years has been adventurous enough to take a typical Ballermann-holiday abroad.
Or Karl-Heinz whom I befriended in South-West Africa in 1968. Forty years later, married and with a grown-up family, he's still in the same place.
The old accounting-colleague from my days in New Guinea in 1970, Graeme, would've never left Rabaul either had it not been for the volcanic eruption in 1994 which wiped out the town and Graeme's fortunes with it.
In Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" is the oft-repeated question whether we would be willing to repeat the precise life we have lived again and again throughout eternity. Nietzsche's message to us was to live life in such a way that we would be willing to repeat the same life eternally.
There but for the Grace of God go I ? Well, however ill- or well-considered, my own choices have had a lot to do with where I am today and I like to think that I have lived my life rather than having been lived by it.
