No one really can have any idea if it's luck or happenstance or timing or fate or the universe or just smart choices that grant you a good life, a happy one. All we can do is decide to own our choices no matter what, to honor them and ourselves as best we can. That whatever is within our control (and there is plenty that is not) is ours. Mine. Responsibility. Conviction.

If we always take the path of least resistance, if we embrace inertia, if we never leap, if we never accept accountability for our choices, how can we find any triumph in our victories or any remorse in our losses?

That you can look back fondly or even wistfully on pieces of your life and hound yourself with endless what-ifs, but nothing will change. The present will still be the present. The future will still unfold as it's meant to.

There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.

We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless.

But what's regret anyway? Regret, I am learning these days, is a lot of things. But mostly, it's a slippery seed of longing, of looking back and asking yourself why you didn't know better when the answers were so obvious all along.

There is the before. And then there is the after. Happiness is what you choose, what you follow, not what follows you. These are the things I have seen, these are the things I now know, these are the things I will carry with me as I go.