In my life, one of the qualities that I'm most grateful for is a lack of regret over life choices. When I'm at a crossroads I will agonize over the 'right' decision, which path to take at the major forks in the road, work, school, travel, what have you. Yes, I will research, hem, haw, waffle, and eventually settle on one road. Once that decision is made, however, it's made without regret. I'm not so much the optimist to be certain that I've always made the right decision, but I'm confident enough to be certain that I wouldn't want to go back and change it given the chance.

Maybe it's that I'm charmed, maybe I'm just good at choosing the right path, or maybe it's that I make the best of the decisions I make so that upon exceeding my own expectations, I'm glad I didn't choose the alternative, because the pessimistic expectation of the other path never measures up to the actual experience of the path I followed.

Whatever the reason, this habit has helped me to not fall into complacency and, if not always to take the road less traveled, at least not fear it as much. It makes me look forward to the forks in the road, because each one is an opportunity and a challenge.

The main point here is that in these things I always look to the future, not the past. I can plan it out, chart a path, follow it, make fast changes if need be, but never look back and say 'if only I hadn't made that turn.'

...

I realized yesterday that while I may walk forward without looking back in the arenas of money, work, education, and essentially every area where it is me vs. the world, I'm completely the opposite when it comes to friendship and love.

In matters of the heart, decisions seem preordained even if they're wrong. I can find no more convincing evidence within myself that each of us has two brains, connected at the corpus collosum, than by looking at the stark difference between how I perceive the future and the past, opportunity and regret, contrasted by emotional versus intellectual situations.

I'm probably not alone in this, but my heart rarely follows a logical path, and the decision-making process doesn't play much of a part in the 'what to do' stage, being called into play only when I'm figuring out 'how to do it.'

Back to the point, as much as I look to the future for intellectual pursuits, I'm always facing backward in love, analyzing decisions years gone, regretting missed opportunities or boneheaded decisions, often experiencing the sorrow that is not only missing when retrospecting more self-centered areas of my life, but regret which counterbalances the optimism and excitement that my intellectual brain feels when thinking about the future as it so often does.

...

So what's the practical application of this discovery? Hell if I know, but I'll probably have better luck if I examine it as an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional one. Not to say that I should look at love from a mechanical perspective, but I should determine if my intellect can tell my emotions something about optimism. Maybe it's just that I'm locked into the intellectual brain right now and it's the one doing the typing, but I'm biased right now to also mention that I'd prefer my emotional brain not to clue my intellect in to the many flavors of regret.

Love's journey is like a balloon ride. You have little control over where the winds take you; all you can decide is where to start and when to stop.