What would happen if you lived a different life?  In what direction would you have gone?  Where would you have ended up?  These stories tell of longing for roads not taken.

In Samuel Gusman, a hobo-Socrates lives the life of an explorer, seeker, and bum.  He claims to have no “net” beneath him, as he explains to his friend, a government worker, who has achieved a secure life, but at the cost of his freedom?

In The Skeptic, the host at a dinner party plays fortune teller by reading tarot cards to his attractive neighbor, but as he turns over the last card, he ends the game not wanting to say what the card tells him.

In A Visit to the National Gallery, a wife admires a painting of  a Madonna and Child, but her husband becomes sad thinking of their childless marriage.  They both long for lives they did not lead.

In The Purple Note, an older man finds a note written to him thirty years earlier and tucked inside the pages of his college poetry book.  He had never noticed the note and finds that it was written by a girl he had loved mostly from afar.  If he had read the note, would his life have gone to a different place?

Read these stories and consider a pivotal point in your life and how it would have differed if you had made a different decision.