Imagine to Remember

A single movement, however small and imperceptible to human eyes, can alter the course of fate. Theorists have named this phenomenon the butterfly effect. It was the mathematician Alan Turing who famously said “The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimetre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.” If you have lived long enough you too will know this truth intimately and likely you will have your own stories to tell. The car accident you just barely missed, the chance encounter with a stranger, such are the mysteries of life and yet I find myself, in a maddening effort trying to explore all the paths not taken, the destinies unfulfilled. 

There is for me a single point in my story, where it seems my fate was forever altered, and now some twenty years later I cannot help but wonder; to try and conjure up all my other selves, all the infinite ways my life could be other than what it is. And this crazed exercise is not because I am sufferinf from some depression or mania but rather what seems to me the delicate nature of life, my life. There are many responses to my dilemma. There is of course that it is simply 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘵𝘶𝘶𝘣, it was written, that we are simply actors on this earthly stage and yet I must contend with the reality of our free will. Some new age types might tell me that I chose my path before I incarnated here as part of my soul’s contract and that if I fail to fulfill it I will be sent back again and again. And there is the most pathetic response of them all, the atheistic, materialistic, that it really is just meaningless. ⁣⁣

I, like many of my generation, am forever marked by the Final Destination series. The premise is always the same: someone seemingly misses their appointment with death only to find that there really is no escape, they will die, and it will be gruesome. Even now I dare not drive behind a truck carrying logs, the images from the film are seared into my consciousness. And yet even scarier somehow than those gory scenes, was the actual message of the film, the simple inescapable nature of one’s fate, that there really are no misses, no deviations, and that for each of us there is the path we must walk and there there is the appointed time. Sensitive child that I was, and still am, I have never been able to shake the eerie feelings those films evoked, even now, this strange knowing that one step could be my undoing, to feel the gaze of the watchers and to know that my time is also coming.