July 25, 2009
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Second Chance
Life is full of surprises, some good, some bad. We enter life based on chance – a one in several million chance of a certain sperm reaching the egg – and everything we ever do is based on percentages. Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you don’t. Perhaps it is this subconscious knowledge that makes us humans love places like Macao, Vegas, Atlantic City, and any other gambling Mecca.
Everything we do in life is based on our decisions. Everything that happens in our life happens because of decisions we made in the past, whether that was in our control or not. Of course, many of those things would have happened anyway, but our own personal involvement in them could – perhaps – have been different had we acted in a different way, or made a different decision.
There is a man in Japan who survived the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the only person recognised to have survived both attacks. He had gone to hospital after the initial bomb drop in Hiroshima, been released from hospital and returned home to Nagasaki, where he had assumed (wrongly) he would be safe. Just hours after returning home, the city he was in once more was hit. The chances of that? Who can tell? The chances of him surviving? Probably even less.
Sometimes life also brings us a second chance, the opportunity to right wrongs, the possibility to make things good again. Joanne recently came back in to my life, sending me an instant message, talking about how concerned she was at getting too old, not able to marry and have a baby. For a while, many of the old emotions that I had for her were rekindled, and I entertained perhaps a small amount of hope for some kind of reconciliation. Maybe even us getting back together. Perhaps before I would have jumped at the chance without thinking, but I am an old man now, and a tiny amount of wisdom has somehow trickled through the – up til now – extremely reliable filters, and so I was very wary.
I was not going to let her hurt me again, that was for sure. In fact the only person who could have hurt me in that respect was me. So I talked with her, but did not get my hopes up, did not push for anything, did not do anything that could cause pain in my heart, because when I was dumped almost 3 years ago now, that was enough pain for me in this lifetime. After a couple of weeks discussing things on MSN/Yahoo, I realised that she was still no further on from the confused child she was (and child describes it fine, because she is that way in that a child can not make a decision to further his/her life, and so will just accept decisions made for him/her). She did not even know IF she wanted to be married and have kids. So why worry about it and talk with me about it? Of all the people in the world, she chose to talk with me about it.
I am the man who would have married her in a heartbeat. 3 years on though, she has not progressed in any state, especially not emotionally. I, on the other hand, have. I told her that I was not prepared for her to treat me like this, and said she will not hear from me again. If there had been a chance for us to get together, perhaps I would have taken it, but for once I could see the reality which was that she needs something she will not risk going for. She is safe in her comfortable world where she can hide from making decisions. She can stay in this cocoon she has built for herself until the elements of doubt become too much and she has to make a decision. I fear though she will have left it too late by then.
I will always love her, of course. But the love has changed, the love has moved on. I no longer cry for her – I now pity her. I feel sad for her that she has become this woman who can not make a decision. At the age she is now she should be growing up. Instead, she is retreating. In a way, it makes me feel good about myself, because comparatively I have moved on, progressed in many states. All in all, I feel I have become more like the man she wanted me to be. But she will never know that. Nor will she ever see it or feel it, because I know it is too late for that second chance.
I wrote to her, telling her that she would not hear from me again. I am not prepared to allow her to open up that can of emotions once more that would end up only in another heartbreak. I have moved on, and perhaps I did not realise it before, but I seem to have moved on quite a lot further than I had ever realised. We live by the decisions we make, and there are no regrets. In all honesty, I feel good about the decision I made.
