There are decisions that shape our lives forever.  Some small.  Some huge.  Hindsight is always 20/20, but it’s human nature to ask “What if…?”

Several key decisions have shaped my life, and they really have made me who I am today.  I chose to change high schools after my freshman year, and the friends I made at my second school are my best and closest friends to this day.  I had some, shall we say, challenges, my first few years of college, but I met some awesome people at my first school who I still remain close friends with.  I decided to finally leave St. Louis for nearby Springfield to finish out my college career, practically on a whim.  I had some friends there, and I wanted to get out of my hometown, so I that’s where I ended up.  It wasn’t long after arriving when I met a young woman named Megan, who eventually become my wife.

But perhaps the biggest decision of them all came a little over 4 years ago.  We had been toying with the idea of moving away from St. Louis for years.  It almost happened when Megan was looking at law schools.  We were close to making the decision to move to Colorado during the spring of 2007.  We even took a skiing trip there, checking out different neighborhoods and apartments in Denver on our way.

After returning home, we decided to let the honeymoon of our trip wear off before making a decision.  The next day is when we took that fateful dog walk that I’ve mentioned so often before.  It was during that walk when I first heard the words round the world trip.  I dismissed the idea as ridiculous, we fought, I started looking into it, I realized we could do it, and within a week the decision was made-we were going to quit our jobs and go on a year long trip around the world.  It happened that fast.

Now that our initial RTW journey has been over for 20 months, I find myself asking those “What if…?” questions.  Not because I regret our decision in any way.  Quite the contrary.  If you’ve read this site with any regularity, you’d know that the decision to take a RTW trip was the best one we’ve ever made, and it changed both of our lives forever.  Even though we’re right back in the same house, in the same city, with the same friends, and largely the same lives as before our trip, it’s us that have changed so much.

So if this trip impacted us both in such profound ways, why in the world would I ask myself these questions?  Honestly, it’s because I’m a curious person.  I wonder if one tiny thing could have changed our fate?

• What if we didn’t take our dog for a walk that night?
• What if Megan had to work late that night, as she was prone to do at that time?
• What if she had just accepted my initial dismissal and let it go?
• What if we didn’t have the balls to make the decision we did?
• What if we never went on our RTW trip?

It’s an interesting thing to think about.  I’d like to think that if we didn’t have that initial conversation at that particular time, we still would have found our way into this adventure.  But who knows?  We had talked for years about doing something different.  Moving to a new city was always on our minds.  We had looked into moving abroad to teach English as well.  So many ideas came across both of our minds, but for one reason or another, we never took the plunge.  If the idea for the trip didn’t come up at that particular moment, would we have gone?   I find these questions fascinating to ponder.

I find myself wondering, if we didn’t decide to go, where would we be now?  Would we still be in St. Louis?  Would Megan still be in a law firm instead of working in house for a company?  Would I still be teaching high school English?  Would we own a house by now?  Would we have kids?

Or maybe our lives would have taken a different path?  Maybe we would have made that move to Colorado like we had been talking about for years.  Maybe we would have taken the plunge and moved abroad to teach ESL?

I’m not a religious man, but I do believe in fate, karma, and things happening for a reason.  I have no idea what life has in store for us in the future, but I do have the feeling that certain things will fall into place, allowing us to make the decisions necessary for our lives to continue on the paths they’re supposed to be on.  Who knows when that next fateful moment will happen?  Who knows when that next crucial decision will shape our lives for years to come?  Life has a funny way of throwing us curveballs, and I just hope that I’m bright enough to hit those metaphorical curveballs out of the park, making decisions that will continue to shape the person I’m meant to be and the life I’m meant to live.

Do you ever ask those “What if…?” questions?  What type of crucial life decisions have you made that have shaped who you have become and the life you lead?  I’d love to hear your stories in the comments below.