The choices we make change our lives forever

Sometimes when I get in a melancholy mood, I think back on my life and the myriad of choices I've made that has me where I am and I always wonder how totally different my life would have been if my choices had been different.

I had the skills when I was young to be a professional baseball player, just like my dad was, but I got too interested in girls and, consequently, didn't work hard enough to perfect my craft.

I went to the University of Arkansas and tried out for football when I could have gone to a smaller college or university and been a starter.

I left the university without a degree to join the Tulsa Police Department. What might have happened had I stayed and gotten my degree?

I left the Tulsa Police Department after a few years to return to school. If I had stayed on the department, I could have achieved rank, status, pay increases, and retired at 75 percent of my salary averaged over the past five years at the tender age of 41. Of course, I could also be dead.

I've written in the column before about how I met, fell in love, and married the mother of my children. How different my life would have been if my best friend hadn't brought her to the bar that night. My son, Michael, is getting married in July and has given me the greatest honor a son could ever give his dad by asking me to be his best man. If I hadn't of met and fallen in love with Linda, there wouldn't be a Michael or his brother Will.

I was in law school at the University of Tulsa when I received notice that I had been accepted into the Ph.D program in Sociology at Oklahoma State University and had been awarded a teaching assistantship. My father was waiting on me to graduate from law school and join him in his law firm but I dropped out of law school and accepted the appointment into the Ph.D program. How much different my life and the life of my family would have been had I become a lawyer instead of a teacher.

Because I had inquired about several full-time positions while I was attending law school, I interviewed for two in the summer before I started my Ph.D program. One was for the chief of police in a ski resort town in Colorado and the other was for the city manager position in a town in western Colorado. I was offered both jobs, but turned them both down because I was going back to school. Where would I be today if I had taken either of those jobs and not gone back to school?

When my employment ended as an assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern State University, I decided to take a job out of education rather than another teaching job and that resulted in my family moving to a town in Arkansas, 13 miles away from where I grew up. That move was not the right move for me and I started looking for teaching jobs again; that's how I ended up in McCook.

If I had not applied for the McCook teaching position, I would not have been interviewed and hired and I would have not moved here without my family. That move eventually contributed to the end of my marriage, something I feel certain would not have happened had the family remained intact.

But because I moved and because my marriage ended, I eventually had an incredible relationship with a woman that would have never happened had I not made the move. She told me once that she had dreamed about me several years before she had ever met me and when she saw me for the first time, that dream came rushing back to her.

I had never stayed in any one place after high school longer than five years until I moved here and now I've been here for 15. The first year I was here, I applied, interviewed, and was offered at job at a community college in Colorado but turned the job down. I was still married then and had not yet met this amazing woman mentioned in the previous paragraph. What would have happened to my life if I had taken that job?

Finally, the relationship I had with that woman changed my life completely and it changed it forever. I will never again be the person I was before her, for better or worse.

If I had just made one different choice, out of all the choices I've made in my life, my life would have been significantly different than it is. It's a remarkable mental and emotional exercise to go through and if you've never done it, you ought to give it a try.

It will give you a totally new perspective on your life.