Once There Was a Way

I find myself thinking lately about how different my life would be if I had made other choices, tried more things, given more people a chance. I’m not dissatisfied with my life. Just curious about those other lives I’ve left behind. I accept the possibility of alternate realities, despite the argument that their number would be close enough to infinite to make finding even one impossible. Six billion people in the world, making choices every day, each road not taken spinning off into its own reality. Then again, it’s entirely possible that divergent realities are reconnecting to our own every day when our minor choices catch back up. I mean, if I choose to have a homemade egg sandwich for breakfast, it means I didn’t have oatmeal or a fruit salad.  But in the other realities (one where I had oatmeal and the other fruit salad), I may still decide to use the computer while I have my tea. Those realities exist in such close quarters to the one I’m aware of that they must eventually snap back into mine, however temporarily. But let’s say I cut my finger  slicing up fruit for breakfast. Instead of coming online, I go to the hospital. That version of my life spins inexorably further and further away until it becomes impossible to get back to.

Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there is such a thing as destiny. Fate.  Perhaps we start out in this world as the first pearl in a new strand, adding and removing pearls as we live our lives and make our choices. Some pearls would be bigger… The ones where our divergent choices lead to the same outcome.  Perhaps just a similar outcome that hovers over it’s not-so-identical twin, making it shimmer with its own insubstantiality. Eventually all of these personal universes must come back together, of course. We all die. Does each choice lead to a different death? If I become a smoker in one world will it lead to lung cancer in my mid-60’s while in another world I live to 95? Or is it possible that I am at heart a non-addictive personality and no choice can change that? Perhaps it is already determined how we all go and at that moment our myriad selves join together as the pearl of our existence speeds toward the pulsing center of the universe. Perhaps that’s why people say that one’s life flashes before one’s eyes.

Mostly, I just find myself wondering what my life would be like with different people in it. There are things I wish I’d done. There are people I still think about with fondness, even love… sometimes desire, and I can’t help thinking how things would be if I’d chosen them instead of whoever they were unknowingly competing against at the time.  I don’t believe in soulmates, at least not in the conventional idea of them.  I believe in reincarnation and therefore I believe that our souls have met certain other souls before. But where would the growth be if these were the only group of souls our own had close relationships with? So I accept that I could have been happy with someone other than Alan.  As such, I wonder who that person would have been.  The biology TA from freshman year? The boyfriend I always seemed to come back to? The guy I’ve never met in person but who seems to know everything about me? The professor I still wish I had seduced when I had the chance?

This wasn’t supposed to be an existential rant.

~Liz