Worte über Worte / words and yet more words

Philosophy

AN: Sooo. In school we had this kind of task to write an essay about a question that is important to us and I just wrote this, not knowing how to write an essay, but hey, it doesn't really matter. But I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome, so I just wanted to share it with those of you, who are interested I guess? By the way, if you find any mistakes concerning the grammar, I'd be glad if you'd tell me, since my English is kind of meh.

To all Germans reading this, if you have problems understanding this,  just ask me to translate it, okay?

How do you know that you're making the right choices?

For me this is the most important question, because it affects ones life so much, it can change everything. Just one decision can make your life worth living, make it much better or destroy it completely. Our whole life is made of decisions and it's our choice what to do. So what can you do, to not choose the wrong one, how do you know what is right and what's wrong, what will help you and what may end up in a total disaster?

The answer to this question is a riddle, which is probably impossible to solve. You do not know what will happen, life is a labyrinth and you have to walk through it blindfolded, without knowing where to go and if you will ever escape out of it. Maybe you can take a guess or try making choices from your intuition, but even that won't help you all the time and maybe the other choice could have been better, but if you've done something you can't just undo it. As a New York Times book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography "Fall of Frost" once stated: "Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something good on the other path." So there is always something you can't have, no matter what you do, which way you choose, but that doesn't make your decision right or wrong.

Can a decision even be right or wrong? No matter how trivial the thing you do, you can learn from it. I do not think you can speak about wrong or right in this case. Yes, you can call it a "bad idea" or say that it'll have bad consequences, but is it wrong to do it? That's another question.

Is it wrong, if you buy the milk with less fat, which has already gone bad, but you drink it anyway, maybe you don't even notice it or just think it tastes funny and the consequences are that you're getting sick? Would you really call that wrong? No, because it isn't. It was a choice you can learn from and now you could say that it would've been better, if you took the other milk, but would it really? Maybe for your body, you wouldn't have been ill, that's true, but on the other hand you then have learned something, haven't you? Sometimes what you learn from mistakes is worth so much more than just doing something what we call right. So is it a wrong choice, is it really bad?

And who perhaps could actually help us with our decisions, doing the things that could be important for us? The first persons that come to mind, at least mine, are other people, older people preferably. Because who could tell us better about consequences and life than those, who lived and live their lives and experienced things that could still happen to us?

So communication, asking questions and sharing true stories will definitely help avoiding those choices you don't want to make, those consequences you never want to go through and making those decisions that can help you to maybe find a job, love or not to loose somebody, live a life you yourself would consider good and if you regret something you've done you can always search for the knowledge you got from that.

So many, too many people are afraid to ask, afraid of the answers and reactions, so often they choose to not ask, but what if that is the wrong way? What if, what you learn through asking, maybe even just through the reactions, will help you in other, similar situations, which are more important?

But that still isn't the solution, not the answer to this question. The question that comes up, because of this now is, if there even is an answer? Is there anybody who could answer it? I don't think so, that would require the gift of telling the future and that's impossible, as far as we know. And even experience will not help you with everything, because with time there are always new things, new situations and you could be a wise hundred-year-old and not know what to do.

So it seems that there is nothing I or we could do about this, you probably can't answer the question and I for sure can't. And what am I going to do about it? Nothing. I will just live my life, experience the situations, ask the questions and make my choices without knowing what will happen, without knowing if it's wrong or right. And I will ask myself and the people I know and learn, but I will never get the whole answer, there will always be just fragments.

-Stxy_you