Vissable Views

Archive for June, 2011

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When I was a child, I expressed an interest in learning to play the piano.  My parents gave in to my pleading and finally bought a piano.  I started taking lessons when I was approximately seven years old and continued for about ten years.  I wasn’t very good and I absolutely despised practicing.  I kept taking the lessons in part because I did not want to disappoint my parents who had spent a lot of money on the piano (as they would often remind me).  I was also too shy and too embarrassed to tell my piano teacher, who was a very nice man, that I no longer wanted to play – and that was a condition that my mother had dictated. I finally mustered up the courage to quit playing the piano during my senior year of high school.  A few years later, my father died and my mother sold the house that we had lived in.  Neither of us had room for the piano so she gave it away.  I haven’t played the piano for years and I know that what little skill I had is very rusty.  Ironically, however, I find myself missing the ability to sit down at a piano and play.  That is when I get wistful about my piano playing days.  At those times, however, I wonder whether I may resume tickling the ivories again when I retire.

I have reached a stage in my life where I find myself contemplating from time to time whether I have attained the goals that I set for myself.  I have attained most of them.  I received the education I desired in my chosen career.  I have risen through the ranks to a position of prestige and respect.  I have children whom I love dearly.  In many ways I am quite fortunate.  I try to remind myself of that when I find myself dwelling on the goals that I have not achieved.  For example, the happy marriage that I once thought would be inevitable has proven to be elusive instead.  The financial security that I once thought would come as the result of hard work and determination has proven to be elusive as well.  So I will try to stay positive and focus on the goal achieved rather than the goals missed.

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If I could relive the last five years of my life, there is not much that I would change.  I probably would, however, be more financially conservative.  I would save more money because I would realize that a severe recession was looming.  I would sell the property that I inherited when my mother passed away and that I was unable to sell five years ago because I was too sentimental to put it on the market.  I held onto the property through the whole period when real estate prices were skyrocketing in the area where I live.  Now, the bottom has fallen out of the real estate market here and the boom economy has gone bust.  My mother’s property is now worth only a fraction of what I could have sold it for five years ago, if I could even find a buyer for it now.  I try not to think about this situation because it makes me want to kick myself.  I merely try to remind myself that hindsight is always clearest.

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If I knew that I had only two weeks to live, my major regrets would be about the times in my life when I let my fears overrule my desires.  There were many times when I think that I was too cautious and too reserved.  There were also times when I did not express my true feelings out of a fear that I would be rejected or that I would be ridiculed.  Obviously, I cannot change the past now.  Even if I could change the road that I have taken, there is no way of knowing whether the “road not taken” would have led to a better destination.  Nevertheless, until I take my last breath, I will regret not having explored those roads more thoroughly when I was in the springtime of my life.  I no longer have the option of exploring them and would be unable to do so in my last two weeks of life, even if I knew that death was imminent.  So I would probably spend my last two weeks with the people I love in the life that I have created as I have traveled along the paths that I have chosen since the springtime of my life.