What If?

Written By Arushi S Goyal (Grade 8)

‘What’ and ‘if’. These are two seemingly harmless words alone, but when put together have the power to change someone’s life. What if.

I often wonder about some of these ‘what if’s’. What if there was world peace, what if there was no hunger or poverty, what if I hadn’t eaten my breakfast this morning. These question often float about my mind and make me question the decisions I make. For certain people, these could be just two words, but for some, it can haunt them all their lives.

Recently, however, I have learnt something; all of these decisions, the ‘what if’s’, are the things that define who and what we are, our identities. If we had not made the wrong decision we would never have learnt from it. The guilt would not be able to remind us to do better next time. Without the bad choices, we would have never made the good ones.

Instead of wondering what if or what was I want to remember to just focus on the what is because before we know it this time will have slipped through our fingers. To quote one of my favourite movies, The Spectacular Now, “It’s fine to just live in the now… but the best part about now is there’s another one tomorrow. And I’m gonna start making them count”. So I might just a silly 13-year-old girl but I do know that I don’t want to waste my life away hoping that I could have been better, I want to seize every opportunity I get.

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most.”― Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Originally Published in Medium

Featured Image Courtesy – Medium