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• What I’ve Learned

What I Learned:

I’m ordering a medium-rare filet mignon at a country club.

I don’t belong to it.

But the orthodontist I’m meeting does.

He’s fashionably late. 

But I don’t mind. It’s fun to pretend I’m the one who belongs.

I see his silver Audi A8 pull up. 

He parks. He’s wearing brown Ray-Bans, a Tag-Heuer wrist watch, a navy Peter Millar jacket. For just cranking through 130+ patients, he acts like I’m his first guest of the day.

This guy is legit.

The server smiles at him and asks if he wants his “usual.”

He nods and sits down.

He even smells good.

“Let me ask you,” I say. “You seem to have it all—

Was this what you always wanted?”

But he looks offput.

“Thanks… but this career wasn’t what I initially wanted. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love my job and what it brings, but this isn’t the initial vision I had when I was young.”

 “It isn’t?”

“Not at all – I wanted to do finance. Numbers. I loved researching stocks.”

“So if you could choose again—would you still pick orthodontics as your career?”

“I wouldn’t … but …(*he smiles*)

I have absolutely no regrets. ”

He holds up his bourbon.

Cheers.

You know the famous poem – about two paths diverging. 

Robert chooses ‘the one less traveled by.’ 

Most take it as a celebration of doing your own thing; screw conventional wisdom – you do you.  

But maybe it’s about something else.

There were two paths. 

How could he know which one was better? 

He never got to compare them. 

Who’s to say? 

Maybe the true insight of the poem, based on a passage by David Orr, isn’t that you need opt for an unconventional life: 

“It’s that the best way to live is to acknowledge that you’re always making a decision, even though you never know in advance which the right choice might be.” 

Think of what didn’t happen in the poem:

That he stopped, froze, and waited for someone or something to happen; for someone to show the right way.

He chose.

….And that made all the difference.

We are all living with the decisions we made when we were 20-somethings.  

Some of us decided to attend school; others didn’t. 

There’s a million alternatives; a million different lives.

We’ve all perfected our own art of imperfect actions.

But to this orthodontist’s wisdom at dinner:

Don’t stress.

Leave regrets behind.

Life’s an incredible ride.

The path you chose might not be same path you’d choose today.

….And accepting that fact has made all the difference.

Cheers.

In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It. Goes. On.

*^{Reference: David Orr. The Road Not Taken. Penguin Press. 2015.}