Have you ever wondered how an important choice you made in the past made your life what it is now, and that your life could have been much different if you had made a different choice?
Without saying that one choice is better than the other, you will never know what life would have been making a different choice. It can be a choice of school or university to attend, a choice of career, a choice of partner in business and life, or a choice in a country to live in.
How One Choice Can Change the Course of Your Life.
Every day in life we make little choices that do not have a very big impact on our life as a whole like having cheese or desert at the end of a meal.
In the contrary when you decide to marry someone, this is something that can make your life take a specific direction for the best or the worst. Maybe you had to make a choice between one person or another, or a choice between getting married or staying single. What would have been your life making the other choice?
In my case, I didn't want to stay single as I like company and family life, and I didn't have to choose one person over another, I just let life happen. So I can't imagine how my life would have been making the other choice.
The most important choice I had to make in my life was to decide whether to expatriate myself to Canada or Thailand. One thing was sure, I didn't want to stay in France because I wanted more than being in the system with all its advantages, but also restrictions.
I made that choice when I was about 25 years old and had studied both options.
It was easy to immigrate to Canada as being French there was programs for young people to go work in Quebec as to keep the French language alive. I went to a couple of seminars and all was very clear about how to immigrate, find a job and the different help we could receive.
There was a lot of employment opportunities for me as a young movie/TV cameraman in Quebec, much more than in France, and I liked their lifestyle and way of life. I had a friend in Paris who was from Quebec and she often talked about it. The only thing that I didn't like was the long freezing cold winter they have.
I had submitted my application to immigrate there, I was accepted and just had to go to a medical visit to confirm the whole thing.
Looking at Thailand, a successful immigration there was very uncertain, and finding employment very challenging in a country very much different than France. I have to say that I had been interested in that country since I was 16 after seeing a documentary about it and I had books about many countries in Southeast Asia. I was fascinated by the Thai language and its writing, which I learned even before setting foot there.
You may be interested to read my post: How I Learned the Thai Language
What I liked about Thailand was all the year hot weather, the food and the people. I had also learned that I could work in films there, which I did after a very difficult start. An important factor on the decision was that I was married to a Thai woman, at the time my first wife.
Long story short, guess which country I chose?
Thailand!
And I have been here for 25 years never looking back.
But the purpose of this post is to reflect on what if I had chosen Canada?
I sometimes think about that. Maybe I would still be there and still be married to the same woman, or I would have divorced the same, and then remarried with a Canadian? Maybe I would have had 3 children there, or just moved again to another country.
My life would have been completely different with that choice. Maybe I would have stayed in the same line of work? Maybe this was not destined to happen.
One thing is sure, I would not be married to my lovely wife of today and my lovely daughter would not exist and in fact, her own existence is linked to that choice of going to Thailand instead of Canada.
Insn't that mind bugging?
Of course, there are many other choices that led to meet my wife also, but the first big decision to live in a country instead of another created a life that would not be otherwise.
Is that destiny?
It is possible maybe that I went to Canada, stayed there for a while, then moved to Thailand, met my wife and have my daughter Christina.
Is taking another route would have given the same result?
All images are CC0 from https://pixabay.com except the last one that is my own.
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Michel Gerard