Is all of life an elaborate trail of breadcrumbs scattered in unsuspecting corners just to lead us back home?
During one of my mad foraging for a quick fiction fix, an invisible hand’s roll of dice landed Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter right on top of my Kindle reading list. Crouch’s mind-bending, alternate-reality thriller hinges heavily on Many-Worlds Theory, one of quantum mechanics’ bizarre concepts that state that there are multiple worlds branching out as parallel timelines for every decision we did and did not make, with each such world just as real as the one that we are presently aware of. The story is about a physicist who manages to access those worlds and comes self-to-self with his other versions placing himself in a predicament as to which reality he must choose.
Crouch’s dedication page reads,
“This book is for anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”
That might very well be every one of us because in the history of mankind there has never been a single, responsible, decision-making adult who has not wondered about “the other choice” at some point. It sure sounds like a fortuitous thing to be in the protagonist’s shoes being able to peek into different lives and choose the one that includes our could’ves and had-beens, a life where our regrets and mistakes were nonexistent, possibly a world with a better outcome of the choices we made in our current life version. But this other life, if it is anything like our present life, is bound to have the same standard polarities like sorrows and joys, miracles and mishaps, and successes and disappointments. If so, then how truly fortuitous is the option of getting to choose an ideal life from a multitude of others? What if there is another life where I got into a more prestigious university and graduated from a better discipline, but as a result of which I made different friends, never met my partner, and the precious, apple-of-my-eye sons were never born? Or what if the adrenalin rush I felt speeding between two buses in this life landed me in a wheelchair in another life with my story shared around as a cautionary tale.
My present vantage created by my life events, memories, and stories, both grateful and regretful, is the only true reference point I have to what my life could ever be. If a multitude of lives opened up for my picking right now with endless permutations of my life events, would I know which one to choose? With the knowledge of having what I have right now, is it possible for me to see my life story any differently?
Humans are neither capable of perceiving what is right for us nor designed to content with what was had by us. We are the uncertain, insatiable lot for whom the grass will forever be greener in the other life. Sometimes it is easier if we don’t have choices in life and it is an undeniable blessing that we are made to be aware of only one life. This life. It saves us from the burden of having to choose and then second-guessing what we had chosen.
However, this existential simplicity is lost on us when we scale down the same logic and apply it moment by moment. At any given time, we have one moment presented to us with one reality, yet we see every moment as if there are a multitude of moments to choose from. We make the choice for the ‘now’ influenced by a remembered past or a nonexistent future but never see ‘now’ for what it really holds. With a distorted choice in mind, we expect the reality to match our liking and suffer when the outcome is different.
‘This moment’ comes with one true reality that requires no choosing but only a conscious seeing. This moment has but one choice, the choice to either see it for what it truly is or overlook it with glassy eyes set on something that is not.
There is a term in Mahayana Buddhism called ‘Tathata’ which means “suchness” or “as-is-ness” or simply, ‘as it is right now’. The ambiguity in the term is deliberate to deter us from projecting our words and stories onto the term but what it implies is the complete acceptance of reality as how it is right now. It is not how it should’ve been this way or how it could’ve been that way, but knowing and acknowledging how it is right now as the only way.
Life is already choosing the ‘now’ for us with a liberating tool called reality. We either stay present, accept it, and flow along or resist and plod along. One way or the other, we are bound to move forward.
