Yesterday I said I would write a new post about the idea that each of our choices creates an alternate universe, since some people (Dad!) don't remember my post about it from my old blog. To be fair, I'm sure practically no one remembers that post and most of you probably never even saw it in the first place.
Anyway, it was inspired by a movie called Mr. Nobody, which I highly recommend. The basis of the movie is that we see all of the different paths one guy's life could take depending on the choices he makes. They showed it in such a way that all of these different lives seem to be happening at once though.
This made me start to wonder about the possibility of another version of myself who made better decisions than I have, and is therefore living a better life than I am. Then I started thinking about how even the most mundane decision have the potential to cause enormous changes in our lives. When my dad and I were talking about this yesterday, I used the example of the decision of what to eat for breakfast. I said that if you are trying to decide whether to eat cereal or pancakes (both vegan, of course) that you would create two universes, one in which you eat pancakes and one in which you eat cereal. He said "I think it would probably have to be bigger decisions than that to create a whole new universe." But if you really think about it, that decision could have the potential to change everything for you.
Say it's the weekend and you are planning to go grocery shopping that day. You wake up and you think "Should I have pancakes or cereal for breakfast before I leave?" Well, pancakes would take longer to make; so that would put you, lets say, ten minutes later than if you had the cereal? So you leave the house ten minutes later and because of that you happen to reach a particular intersection at the very moment that someone in another car takes his eyes off the road, and you are killed in a crash. Or we could say that, because you were ten minutes later, you end up being at the grocery store at the same time as someone who you fall madly in love and spend the rest of your life with, or someone who winds up offering you your dream job, or someone who becomes your closest friend, etc. But then, you could think of it the other way and leaving the house ten minutes earlier could put you in the position to die horribly, or to change your life for the better.
The point here is, even the most mundane choices could potentially be the most important decisions we ever make, and we have no way of knowing whether they are, or whether we made the right ones, or whether there is some alternate version of us out there who made the opposite choice and is far better off because of it. Every time I leave my house (or choose not to leave my house, for that matter) I can't help but wonder what opportunities I may have missed, or created, by leaving (or not leaving) precisely when I did. I know that was long and rambling and kind of insane. Sorry.
Only 12 hours left to vote for me in PETA's Sexiest Vegan Next Door Contest. Then you won't have to hear any more about it :)
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