🍏 Pruning

Sometimes life is about pruning.

Mourning what could be, chopping off branching paths that you could have followed, killing potential selves.

To commit to something means adjusting your understanding of your potential: you have to crush and constrain who you might be. If you want to be this, you can't be that.

You could try to keep your options open, try to hold on to your adolescent potential, try to always keep your options open - but you end up stunted and under-grown. You're Peter Pan, eternally stuck in boyhood, puer aeternus, the eternal child. 

The eternal child can be fun, winsome, entertaining. The eternal child doesn't ever have to prune their lives, make adult choices, cut themselves off from potential.

But like unpruned apple trees, their life eventually collapses under the weight of their untrimmed branches, and the fruit they produce is small and bitter.