Things I learned from MTV

Tonight I watched MTV's Teen Mom, I was channel flicking after how I met your mother. How did I meet your mother? I don't know.

Well, on Teen Mom there aren't very many lessons to learn other than don't have kids when you're still in high school and sixteen and expect to play happy families with the guy you got pregnant with.

The other lesson I learned today was to let go of alternative realities.

There's this one girl that gave her kid up for adoption and she agonises over it every episode. This week she went on a 'birth mother' retreat, and she learned and she grew. They did this one exercise that involved writing the thing that she thought about most on a piece of paper and burning it.

Her thing was 'What if I could have done it.' as in, what if she could have kept the baby and been an awesome mother and done it.

It was something she had to let go of, and I realised it was a good lesson in life. All too much do we look at our own lives and how we got to this point then wonder what could have happened if a different choice had been made a pivotal moment, or if someone else made that choice by the situation never being presented.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I never quit good creative and did masters, or if I never even got the job at good, or if I'd decided to go to LA rather than Salt Lake City after Masters, or if Delta let Maddy Miller take two dogs on the plane and she didn't need me at all.

I don't look at these moments and get terrified, I sometimes look and wonder who I would have been or what I would have become, or what other choices I would have been presented with.

I think the best thing though is be happy with the decisions that were made at the time. The decisions I have made in my life were for my happiness and the best decision I could have made at that time based on all the input and evidence surrounding the choice.

I think the eternal divine intervention perspective is to be happy that the choices we made will work out and lead us to the path that will make us the happiest in the long run regardless of all the pain and hurt and mental torment we go through to get there.

I also think the key is to never regret a choice. Agonising over a decision that was once made will only cause the current path to be negative and miserable. Because the grass is always greener. We have no idea how a certain choice would have worked out, but we imagine it to be sunny and happy and delightful, but we don't know that for sure.

Don't regret, and don't look back with negativity towards the present. Things happen, that's life, it's how we move on, and use the hurt we once felt and make it into something positive that makes all of our choices the right ones.

And, you know what, if you do believe you've made an incorrect choice, you still have a choice to change it. Fact.