Get on the Train

All aboard.

The rest of my life is leaving from the station.

You ever stop and think about a moment as if you were the main character in Sliding Doors?

I mean, at each moment in life, you could let the next 5 seconds determine the entire rest of your existence.

It could be as big a decision as whether or not you ride home with someone who has been drinking, or as small as whether you pause to pick up a piece of trash before getting on the subway.

Riding home with the drinker might get you in an accident that paralyzes you from the waist down. Picking up that piece of trash on the subway may turn into a contact for a long-lost friend or business venture.

And Wham! the random chance fairy (Name: Bernice, Turn ons: Walks on the beach and men who cook. Turn offs: Ear hair) tackles you like a sack of rocks, and off you go in a new direction.

What the hell would be different if I had chosen against the Master's degree? I'd have finished school a year earlier. And my entire life would be different because of it. Right down to the last minutia of my character.

Everything. That's what would be different.

"What if I had followed through?"

"What if I hadn't given up?"

"What if she had just listened to me?"

"Why Me?"

We ask ourselves these questions every day, knowing that each choice has only one outcome and we must live with the consequences of that outcome.

Maybe that's why the "infinite fracturing universes" theory appeals to us all so much. Maybe deep down, we dream that, like some weird perversion of the Butterfly Effect (which I haven't seen) we'll find a way to not travel back in time, but instead skip sideways, to other dimensions where we never got in that fight in fifth grade. Or never got mugged on the subway.

Maybe if we skipped from universe to universe we could find one where we had nice parents, a good life. Where we never got degraded or raped or judged or hated or scorned.

Maybe we would find, that in that perfect life, we didn't turn into happier versions of ourselves.

What if that version of ourselves--the one who never suffered like we suffered--grew up without any empathy or compassion? What if that perfect world without pain was a place where we were incapable of learning to care for others?

Is that why God lets bad things happen to good people?

Maybe that's the secret about all those bad things. If they didn't happen, maybe we wouldn't be good people.