One Important Change (Ist Prize Winner)

SECOND CHANCE

Everyone wants to have a second chance or a second "shy" at something, and I am no different!
If one looks at one's past life from different perspectives, one sees different things that one wishes ought to have turned out differently. It all depends on what you think at present about what is the most important thing in your life.
Is it money?
Is it fame?
Is it happiness?
Is it your family?
Is it your work?
Depending upon what you value most, your perspective on the past will also change!
To give an example, I had an opportunity to go and work abroad in a Pediatric clinic when I was just wooing my present wife of 14 years. Had I taken that job, I would have been financially very well off, but I would have missed the one person who I later married, and who is, today, the mother of our two most beautiful daughters!

Similarly, at around the age of 15, I had a chance of working in a publishing firm. I was employed there for just six days, and all I did then was to move heaps of papers from here to there, and from there to ... some other place. No challenge, no novelty and no fun, so I bowed out.
Who knows, if I had stuck there, I might have started my own publishing business, and yes, become rich. Even authors at writing.com might have approached me to get their first novels published.
And yet, would I have had the time to write my own stuff? Would I have become a Pediatrician and healed so many sick children? Would I have met a beautiful nurse, who later became my wife?

Ergo, I am a firm believer in the old adage that:

Que Sera Sera... Whatever will be, will be...
The Future's not ours to see...
Que Sera Sera...
What will be, will be!

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Life never deals all the four Aces to anyone!
So why crib about things that cannot be changed?
And yet...
If there was ONE thing I could have changed, it would have been the decision to become a DOCTOR, and not a BUSINESSMAN.
I loved kids right from an age when I myself was one.
Right from my medical college days, it was the only thing I wanted to do... be a kids' doctor.
Now that I am one, I am stunned at my error. With improving children's health all over the world, and also in our own country, Pediatrics is neither satisfying for the soul(fewer lives to save), nor for the pocket(lesser cash-flow)!
I ardently wish, therefore, that I had embraced my father's tottering business of paper and boards which he was unable to run profitably.
This is all that I wish I had done differently.
Otherwise, life is a dream come true:
There is all the time to stand and stare....
and write stories, poems, articles, essays, etc.
There is time to view the sunset... well, at least on three of the seven week-days.
There is time to go out with the kids to see the stars at a planetarium, the curios at an art gallery, and the exhibits in a museum.
There is time to sit by a road-side table at a cafe, and order french fries and hamburgers while the world passes us by.
There is time to pray to Almighty, five times a day, and to seek salvation and absolution.
There is time to read Shakespeare, Bronte, Ludlum and Wilbur Smith.

So there it is, in a nutshell.
All the agony and all the ecstasy of the wish to change the past.