While it's often fashionable to dwell upon what might have been, what's usually overlooked, is that really and truly, it couldn't have.

Because, invariably, any romanticized versions of how things "might have been," are based upon fictionalized versions of the past.

You see, darlings, most of the time when people think the present could have been different than it is, it's because they think the past was different than it was. Happily, the future can still be anything.

An end result, imagined clearly and acted upon with expectation, will always force the circumstances necessary to bring about its own manifestation, no matter how unpredictable, unlikely or even impossible those circumstances may have previously seemed.

Like clockwork, darlings.

At which point, of course, the one who did the imagining and expecting will be said to have "lucked out royally" by all those who don't yet know how life really works.

Consider it flattery, my dears.

When someone can say, without doubt or equivocation, that, "My life today is entirely the result of my prior decisions, focus and understandings," I would then say, without doubt or equivocation, that it's only a matter of time before their every cup is overflowing.

It's simply unavoidable, darlings.