Life is an incredible journey filled with ups and downs, highs and lows, agony and ecstasy and we never know what's going to happen next. I do my best to explain this to my sociology students every time we meet and yet, sometimes, I don't have the answers either.

I think we all know, at some level, that wherever we are in life at any point in time is where we're supposed to be. We're supposed to be there because it's our actions or inactions, our decisions or our indecisions and our choices or failing to make choices that got us here to begin with. I often play mental chess with myself, wondering about how maybe a single decision made years ago or even decades ago, sent my life in a totally different direction, although I didn't know it at the time.

What if I had chosen a different college or university to go to? What if I had decided on a different major? What if I had made a different job choice? What if I had married a different woman? Would any or all of those things have changed who I became and where I ended up?

Of course they would have. Because nothing that happens to us happens in a vacuum. Every choice we make leads us down a road we wouldn't have taken without that choice, presenting us with different situations and different people in our lives. And our choices never stop. We continue to decide where to go, who to go with, who to associate with, who our friends are, and who to spend our lives with and each one of those decisions continues to impact on the value, direction, and quality of our lives.

During the last serious relationship I had with a woman, I told her once that there was no way that fate could have just thrown us together for a brief period of time, only to pull us back and send us in different directions again. What would have been the point of that? What would be the object lesson to learn from two people exchanging their hearts and souls with each other, only to grab them back and head off in another direction a few years later? She told me she had had a dream about me ten years before she ever met me and when she saw me for the very first time, that dream came rushing back to her and she immediately knew I was who she was supposed to be with. Except she's not.

Before her, the woman I was married to told me that she had her fortune read by a gypsy when she was at girl scout camp when she was still a teen-ager and the gypsy told her she would marry twice and have three sons. She had one son with her first husband and two sons with me. We divorced eight years ago and she hasn't remarried.

I've always tried to make some sense out of the world we share with each other. I grew up believing that good things happened to good people and bad things happened to bad people because the world that was taught to me was black and white. There were no gray areas at all. Yet, as I lived and aged in this world, I found there to be much more gray than either black OR white. I found that really terrible things sometimes happen to good people and really good things happen to those that aren't so good and I found that most of the time, things don't make a whole lot of sense. I see people born with everything and end up with nothing and people born with nothing end up with everything and I see people all the way across these opposite extremes.

I have friendships that have endured and I don't know why. I had friendships that ended up being temporary and transitory and don't know why. I've been in relationships I thought were perfect only to see them implode and don't know why. I have a great job and am surrounded by wonderful colleagues and caring students and don't know why.

One of the most frustrating things about life is that we all look for answers and we hardly ever get them. I believe one of the reasons we love sports as much as we do is because in sports, they keep score. You know at every interval of the contest being played what the score is and whether there's still time for a comeback. I've often longed for a scoreboard in the game of life. Something that tells us whether we're ahead or behind and, if we are behind, how much time we have left to catch up.

But there's no scoreboard. All we have are our own perceptions, definitions, hopes and dreams. We don't know if it's fourth and long or first and ten and we have no idea how much time is left.

So the only thing that seems logical is to keep playing as hard as we can for as long as we can and hope there's enough time left to still win.