Consequences

I was walking today, thinking about the past, thinking about life, thinking about mistakes, and all the usual depressing, existentialist, or otherwise curious thoughts that come with that. And suddenly it just hit me:

I have to live with the consequences of the decisions I made every day of my life.

Everything that happened half a year ago, all of the things I hadn't even thought about then...and now I'm dealing with it. I never really thought before about just how much I am affected by certain things. But what it really comes down to is that every single day, without exception, the decisions I made in the past play a major role in the way things turn out for me, the way I view people, and the further decisions I make.

Life isn't a game. While I realized it before, and understood that actions have consequences and such, it never really hit me until now. Because suddenly I know what it means to live with the consequences of a decision. I know how it feels when people turn to look at you and you know exactly what they're thinking of you. I know what it is to never be able to get back what you had in the past because you made the not-so-wise decision to walk away from it. No, I do not regret any of it, but yes, I would do it differently if it were offered to me again.

This has made life more real to me. Before, the consequences were the anger of friends or family and the temporary loss of opportunity. Now, there's a bigger impact, and I'm beginning to really understand it. And those consequences don't only apply to people's opinions and the external world, they also apply to me. My personality has changed as a result of the actions I have taken, I have acted differently because of what has happened in the past.

It's never easy to just see the consequences of an action laid out into the future, but the awareness of their presence adds to a more thorough understanding of the responsibility for oneself. This isn't really a guarantee against mistakes in the future, but it is definitely a more thorough realization of consequences. It's interesting to think that despite having thought that I understood the concept for years, it never really made complete sense until now...until I had undergone something that I could not have envisioned a year ago.