The most disastrous decisions we make in our lives stem from either one of two things: not seeing the big picture, or seeing the big picture and not giving a damn about it.

This is not only in political life and choosing which government or prime minister we think best to lead the country. It applies to every other area of our life and work, too. When we lose sight of the big picture, or when we don’t bother to assess its significance, we get tangled up in the details, in the petty things, and find ourselves in a mess at some point down the road, whether it’s hours, days, weeks, months or even years.

There are some mistakes which cannot be undone and which cannot be mopped up with regret or apologies or promises to think harder the next time. Most of us are raised on fairy-tales but the reality is that in life there are no real happy endings. One person’s happy ending can be another person’s tragedy. The most we can hope for is the twofold ability to recognise forks in the road for what they are and to detect the icebergs beneath the surface, and then to be able to think with clarity about their significance and what we should do.

I suppose this is about foresight, but not necessarily just that. Foresight is pointless without the ability to recognise when the time for foresight has come. How often have we heard ourselves and others say, “Oh but I never thought that would happen. It seemed just an ordinary decision to me. I never for a moment imagined that these would be the consequences.”

There are times when even the most innocuous-seeming decision triggers off an entire chain of events and circumstances that change people’s lives irremediably and forever, down the generations. It’s a Sliding Doors situation – there was a film of that name, about the two different lives a young woman had depending on whether she got into a particular train carriage or not.

You can go out for a walk, get knocked down by a lorry and killed, and your children will grow up without a parent, their children without a grandparent, your spouse might marry again and bring a whole new family into being – entire lives skewed or shaped or both by the decision to take a walk at precisely 3pm on a Thursday afternoon.

And that’s just chance, the swings and roundabouts of fortune. Where we have control over situations, we should do our best to exercise it, to understand the magnitude of what we are about to do, how this can shape our lives and the lives of those around us.

With a general election, the consequences of our decision to vote for X, Y or Z, or not to vote at all, are extremely serious indeed. It makes me shudder when I hear people talk about not voting because they’re angry, voting for AD on some fantastical idea of a seat and a casting vote and a coalition, voting for Joseph Muscat to try him out. You’re choosing the government, for goodness sake. You’re not playing games of spite, revenge or idealistic dreams. This is real life for grown-ups and it is not a game.

The way we live (or don’t) is shaped by the people who run the country. It’s not because Malta is small, but because that is the way of things. Spain, Italy, Greece and France are not small at all, but the lives of the people who live there have been shaped in the most dreadful way by the governments they chose. Those who were not responsible for the choosing have had to suffer alongside those who were – just as those who are not responsible for choosing good governments benefit from the wisdom of other people’s choices. Those who voted against EU membership, for instance, became EU citizens alongside those of us who voted for it.

Roughly half of the population has voted Labour consistently since the early 1970s and the miserable Mintoff years, doggedly doing so despite the Nationalist Party having changed Malta from a satellite of Gaddafi’s Libya and the image of Hoxha’s Albania to an EU member state. But they have benefited immeasurably and well from the policies and the actions for which they never voted, which they even voted against. When it was the other way round, those of us who never voted Labour, who never voted for Mintoff, or KMB, or Alfred Sant, had to endure the disasters that others brought into being.

There is no scope for pettiness in a general election, no room for shallow thinking or spite. Your vote is neither a weapon nor is it currency. It is a responsible choice. That is why it is given only to adults and not to children. When voting, we are expected to behave like grown-ups, to make a mature assessment of the situation and leave aside childish and petty emotions, put away personal animosity, to decide what is best for the country, for the economy, and for the next five years of our lives – to understand, indeed, that the negative or positive effects of our decision on Saturday will go way beyond those five years.

Remember this: the otherwise sensible people who voted for Mintoff in 1971 and never did so again still carry the guilt to this day. They recognised that what they did was catastrophic for Malta, but by then it was far too late.