Rules of Civility: My Favorite Passage

I recently read Rules Of Civility.  I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for that next great read.  It took me a little while to get into it, but in the end, I loved it.This passage is on the second to last page of the book, and I’ve re-read it at least ten times.  If you’re staring mid-life in the face, I think you will relate to it. 

“It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time– by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries.  But for the most of us, life is nothing like that.  Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options.  Do I take this job or that job?  In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home with at the end of the night?  And does one make time for children now?  Or later?  Or later still?

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge.  In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions– we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second.  And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

-Amor Towles, Rules Of Civility