Lost on the River

People always say that things happen for a reason, or that they happen the way they’re supposed to. But that’s not true, not really. There’s a reason why everything happens, but that’s cause-and-effect, not fate or purpose. We say things happen the way they’re supposed to, but that’s only because that’s the way they did happen. This is not the best of all possible worlds. There are better worlds than this. We just can’t imagine what they’re like.

Yesterday I went shopping and bought an item for just shy of nine dollars. I paid with a twenty. My change should have been eleven something, but because the bills were new and crisp, the woman at the register handed me two tens instead of one. I didn’t notice until later when I was out of the store, so I found myself with an extra ten dollars. That’s such a little thing. But because of that extra ten dollars, I felt free to go out for coffee with a friend when I might not have otherwise. And that meant that I didn’t get to the studio as early in the evening as I’d meant to, didn’t call another friend until later than I’d planned. Maybe if I’d called sooner we would have talked for an hour. Maybe if I’d shown up at the studio an hour earlier, I would have seen someone I knew there. Or maybe if I’d gone to the store fifteen minutes earlier, I would have gotten the correct change. Who can say? Our lives are a series of cascading events, each one building on the last, and with each passing minute it becomes harder to guess what might have been.

Ultimately, ten dollars doesn’t matter much. It might have affected my evening yesterday, but probably doesn’t have much bearing on my day today. But what about a real change, a significant event? I was talking about this to some people not too long ago. We were asking what ifs. What if I’d gone to a different school? What if I’d grown up in a different town? What if I’d never met this person, or gotten involved with that one? We were able to make a few educated guesses on a couple of them, but for the most part, they’re meaningless questions. You might as well ask “What if I’d been born with a tail?” of “What if the sky was orange?” They’re such huge parts of your life, you can’t fully understand the impact of them. It’s immeasurable, unfathomable.

When I discussed this a while back, we talked about time as well. Time is a funny thing. There are a dozen theories about it, each more wild than the last. Most seem to agree that time, as we understand (or try to understand) it, doesn’t really exist. Linear time is only a matter of perspective, but it’s the perspective we’re dealing with here. We generally think of our idea of time as a river, or a road. Each decision, each moment or event, is like a fork. You make a decision, you branch off. Or you don’t, and you stay the course for a little while longer. There are an infinite number of paths, a seemingly impossible number of possibilities. Each road is distinct clear to the people on it, but it’s the only one. We know that there are other roads, but we can’t see them. We look back on the path behind us, and we can see the forks, but not where they lead. “What if” is an eternal mystery, a question that no one can ever know the answer to, which is exactly why if gets asked so often. We tend to like questions like that.

If it is impossible to understand the things that never were, it is equally impossible to understand the things that could be. We can guess at the future, at what will happen if this or that, but it’s the same as wondering what would have happened. The best we can do is an educated guess. To find out for sure, we have to plow ahead, whittle the hypothetical down to a single actual, usually one we never could have foreseen. We go with our best guess, and nine times out of ten it’s wrong, or at least not entirely right. It makes you wonder why anyone even bothers to plan, and if planning isn’t really more about the person than any supposed effect. It’s hard to say.

But what’s interesting to me is this. Most people know all this. They acknowledge the impossibility of what ifs, and recognize the mild futility of planning. They know, or at least they seem to, that things could have gone differently, if it weren’t for a combination of chance and the exact sum total of a lifetime of decisions. And yet, when they look back, most people will still wonder how things could have happened. And most people will probably tell you when all is said and done, that things happened as they were supposed to. They may never say it, but as they look back at the road of their life, deep inside they will avow that yes, this is in fact the best of all possible worlds. And across the vastness of time, down an infinite number of other twists and forks, countless people who look just like them will look back on totally different lives and avow the exact same thing.

I guess, in its own way, that’s comforting to think about. We can’t know the future, but we also can’t be tormented by visions of other lives, maybe better ones. It’s something, at least. Sometimes it’s enough.