don’t mourn the life you didn’t get

deep advice from kim france:

But at 50, it no longer bothers me that my life doesn’t look the way I always assumed it would by that age. There are all sorts of reasons for this, but two stand out. I was fired from the fancy job a few years back, and surprised myself by immediately feeling nothing but relief and excitement over the prospect of starting over—albeit far more modestly. And I received some simple but—to me—powerful advice from somebody who’d gone through some rough years himself: “Don’t mourn the life you didn’t get,” he said, and rather magically, I stopped.