Thinking Aloud

 

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Thinking Aloud: On the Unchosen Paths That Shape a Life

When I look back over my life, I find myself wrestling with a quiet, unsettling truth: I cannot confidently say that I have ever possessed the things I truly desired. Not because I lacked dreams, or the will to pursue them, but because so much of what has defined my journey was decided long before I had the power to choose.

It is a strange thing—this human life. We speak often of “choices,” as though our destinies rest neatly in our hands. Yet, if we peel back the layers, how many of these choices were genuinely ours? How many were shaped by circumstances we never controlled—our birth, our family, the soil we sprang from, the culture that moulded us, the fears that whispered to us?

I did not choose my parents, nor the colour of my skin, nor the land that first held my footsteps. I did not choose my early limitations, or the boundaries of opportunity that framed my world. And yet these unchosen foundations became the architecture of my existence. They shaped my fears, my hopes, my sense of possibility, and even the dreams I dared to imagine.

As a child, I wanted to be a doctor. At another moment, an engineer. I longed to build, to heal, to create meaning through my hands. But dreaming is one thing—sustaining dreams is another. Without support, without resources, without the invisible networks that help dreams breathe, imagination collapses into necessity. And so, I walked paths I did not originally desire—not because they were wrong, but because they were the only ones open to me.

Even when opportunities arose and I reached out to shape my own life, invisible forces still guided my steps. Faith, fear, emotion, duty—they all tangled around my choices. I found myself entering the priesthood not out of pure passion, but out of circumstance, influence, and a longing to anchor my life somewhere, anywhere, that felt stable.

So I ask myself: how much of who I am is truly “me”? And how much is simply the result of conditions I did not author?

Perhaps this is the silent tension of existence—the dance between destiny and choice, between the life we want and the life that forms itself around us. Perhaps we are all, in some way, shaped more by what we did not choose than by what we did.

And yet… there is a strange beauty in this. A sense that even our unchosen paths may hold meaning. That our lives, though not fully ours in the making, can still become ours in the living. That purpose can emerge not only from intention, but from surrender.

I do not have all the answers. I am simply thinking aloud—trying to understand how the mosaic of my life came to be, and whether there is still a deeper pattern waiting to reveal itself in time.

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