My greatest disappointment in living my one life, is that I won't experience all of them. I want to experience every possible lifetime, and I become paralyzed by choice. I've always had this idea that there are infinite lives ahead of me. If I look what routes I can take at any given moment as a branching tree of possibilities, the canopy above me seems endless. And yet I recognize that any step forward necessitates a pruning of paths.

For example, for years I've thought I want to live abroad. How desperately I still want to live in a walkable city, somewhere with a real sense of community. In my travels to Japan and Spain, I got a feel for this. Community so thick, so rich, so vibrant it fills you with life just to sit in its embrace. The endless third spaces in Japanese society. Making new friends with travelers in a hostel in Nagano. Sitting around a plaza as kids played with water guns in the summer heat of Madrid. Simple but beautiful peeks into worlds entirely different than where I'm from. And as these new realities wove themselves into me, my tree of life expanded to include these new paths.

On the other hand, some things in life trim our potential paths. Starting a career locks down your future significantly the longer you sow yourself into it. I am a full stack web developer today. If I stay this way for long, I may never be a robotics engineer, or a sys admin, or hell a fisherman. My pets have trimmed my path, I can't simply leave home for longer than a few days at a time anymore. They are my glorious little responsibilities but they also hold me back from... driving to Washington tomorrow and spending 2 weeks in a cabin in the woods? Whatever I want! I'm making peace with the fact I will never be or do many things.

Perhaps the biggest, a relationship starts to paint a picture of a life farther out than maybe any single decision can. It's a scary thought honestly, to trust another with my tree so deeply. And when I have kids someday, the possibilities of life shrink dramatically. Inherently by setting down roots, you lose flexibility and mobility. But you gain strength and stability.

Thinking too deeply on the future puts me in a state of mourning. I feel that I have so much life to live, that to choose one life is to wrestle with the loss of a thousand. To an outside observer this appears a "grass is greener" mentality; to me it's a fear of living too small.

If life were a video game, I'd be the type of player to complete all the side quests and forget the main quests. What I'm learning is while I've been focused on the breadth of life I can live, I can overlook its depth. And for someone who takes things as they come, I don't often choose a future so much as I arrive.

I vascillate endlessly in this open world. And I am rarely certain of my choices. Which feels strange, because for me to choose something, means I've chosen it over my infinite lives.