What if we don't need to justify our choices?

Can we love where we've arrived without loving everything it took to get here?

In 2012, Zahir Akram sold his house and almost everything he owned to open a yoga studio. For the first few months, he slept on its sofa.

He was struggling with chronic back pain and had reached a point in his life where he felt he needed to start again. He wasn't a businessman, had little experience of running a studio and, by his own admission, had a terrible business plan.

But he believed in what he was doing.

Fourteen years later, that studio has become a place where people have made lifelong friends, trained as teachers and discovered things about themselves they might otherwise have missed. Including people in my family.

It's strange to think how far the consequences of one decision can travel, often into lives we could never have imagined touching.

And yet, when I asked Zahir what he'd tell the younger man sleeping on that sofa, his answer surprised me. "Don't do it. Don't open a yoga studio. Are you mad?" He laughed, but he meant it.

He spoke about the difficulties of running a business, the mistakes he'd made and the years spent trying to recover from the impact of COVID. Then he told me he'd also go back and tell that same young man to keep going. The best years of his life were still ahead. He would meet his wife, Laura. They would have their son, Zaki, who would teach him more about life and love than any book ever could.

And in the end, Zahir said he probably wouldn't tell his younger self anything at all. He'd simply give him a wink and say, "You're doing all right."

The stories we tell ourselves

We like our decisions to make sense in hindsight. When things turn out well, we find meaning in the struggle. The sacrifices become necessary and the mistakes become lessons. When things don't turn out as we'd hoped, we can be equally quick to decide we made the wrong choice.

I recognise that instinct in myself. I like to understand why things happened, find the thread that connects them and, ideally, arrive at some kind of conclusion.

But life doesn't always offer one.

The decisions that shape us rarely have a single outcome. They introduce us to people, close some possibilities and open others we couldn't have anticipated. We can be grateful for what followed without being grateful for everything that happened along the way.

Zahir didn't try to make his story tidy. He could see everything his decision had made possible, but that didn't erase the difficulty of living through it.

I found something rather freeing in that.

One of the things Zahir talked about was the difference between searching for answers and becoming comfortable with questions. He suggested that if learning doesn't leave us with another question, perhaps we've missed something. I wonder whether the same might be true of our choices.

What if we don't need a verdict?

The point of looking back may not always to decide whether we were right or wrong. Maybe it's simply to notice what happened because we chose as we did. What became possible or changed in us. What we understand now that we couldn't have understood then. Or to simply acknowledge what we lost without needing to explain it away.

I've made choices in my life that I'm grateful for, even though I wouldn't necessarily want to live through every part of them again. And I recognise how often I look back, trying to decide whether they were worth it. As though the life I have now needs to justify everything it took to get here.

Looking back, I wonder if some of my most defining choices are the ones I'll never quite know how to feel about.

Which brings me back to Zahir. He spent years building something that has become meaningful to people he may never fully know. But when I asked him to judge the decision that started it all, he couldn't give me a simple answer.

Where We Place Ourselves

My latest conversation is with Zahir Akram, founder of Akram Yoga. We explore his extraordinary decision to start again, the difference between forcing things and allowing them to unfold, and why the places where we find belonging can sometimes become places we need to question.

Zahir is funny, thoughtful and wonderfully willing to challenge conventional wisdom. You don't need to know anything about yoga to enjoy the conversation.

🎧 The Best and Worst Decision of My Life

Listen to the episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-best-and-worst-decision-of-my-life-zahir/id1878422335?i=1000796121163

Explore Zahir's work: https://www.akramyoga.co.uk

Where We Place Ourselves explores what happens to us because of where we choose to place ourselves, and how hearing someone else's story might help us see our own a little differently.