Kuala Lampur, July 27 -- There was a time when I thought the biggest decisions in life were about choosing the right university, the right career or the right place to build a future.

Looking back now, I realise those decisions mattered for a different reason altogether: they quietly decided which memories would one day become mine.

When we think about the choices we have made, our minds have an interesting habit of wandering towards the roads we never took.

We wonder what life might have been like if we had accepted a different job, studied somewhere else, or moved to another city.

"What if" this; "what if" that. We become curious about the futures that never happened.

What we rarely stop to consider, however, is the future that qui...