Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
It’s two in the morning, I can’t sleep, and my my mind is fixed on sliding doors.
What is it with us and the multiverse right now? Why do we seem so obsessed with the idea of many worlds or alternate realities? Marvel movies started with fun stories about individual superheroes and ended its Phase I project with two big Avengers movies, the second of which was all about undoing the actions of the first. Characters died, but we knew a sequel was coming that would have to undo much of the damage. Don’t worry, we told ourselves as we watched beloved characters turn to dust: it’s not permanent; they’ll go back and fix it. And they did. And ever since, Marvel has become obsessed with the multiverse, and it’s all gotten very confusing and self-referential, and, to me, a little weightless. Nothing is permanent, nothing is irrevocable. Nothing matters.
On Apple TV, there’s a miniseries called Dark Matter, based on a very cool and twisty novel in which an average guy has to confront infinite possibilities and varieties, because every action and decision he makes (according to the theory) creates a new branch of reality, a new universe. And infinite is…well, it’s maddeningly infinite. There’s a universe where I put strawberries in my yogurt this morning instead of blueberries. There’s a universe where I put six strawberries in, instead of five. And so on.
I don’t think this cultural moment is because we’re all suddenly fans of edgy physics. I think it’s because we’re feeling vaguely middle-aged for some reason—personally and as a nation. And we had gotten used to feeling pretty feisty and adolescent, like the whole world was ahead of us and we could do anything or be anything we desired. Right now, we can’t seem to help looking back with some wistful regret, wondering how we got here and whether we could have done something different.
You can see it politically on both ends of the spectrum. Republicans’ entire platform is about rolling back the clock to some earlier, allegedly better time in America. Democrats are happily chanting. “we’re not going back,” but many of them can’t help looking at things like the electoral college and wishing there was a way to go back in time and get rid of it, because fixing it now seems so impossible.
In our own lives, it can be an addictive mind-game to play, whether you’re thinking about a literal multiverse, as in Dark Matter, or simply an alternate pathway, as in the movie, Sliding Doors. What if I had done X instead of Y? What would my life look like now?
Of course, we often rig the game by saying, “if I had known then what I know now, I would have done things differently.” But you didn’t know then what you know now, did you? If you did, you would have been a different person: Now You, not Back Then You. The question is, could Back Then You have made a different decision?
There’s a more deterministic school of thought that would say No. You are a contingent being, defined and limited by all the experiences and actions and decisions of your past. The things that made you who you were, at that moment, condemned you to take exactly the action that you took. Character is destiny. We know that it’s the only decision you could have made, because, look: it’s the decision you did make. Part of what makes you You is the fact that you did X at that point in time. Part of what made you do X is that you were You.
But there’s another school of thought that would say Yes, you might have made a different decision, because so much besides your personality and your past can affect your decision-making. Had it been cloudy that day, it might have affected your mood. If you hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep. If you were suffering from a slight cold. If the sun had been in your eyes. If a mosquito had just bitten you, you might have been in a fouler mood just at the moment when you made some decision. So, yes, you did take Action X. But you didn’t have to. Any dumb, little fluke of the world might have put you in a slightly different frame of mind and affected your thinking.
There are many moments that I look back on and wonder about. Leaving Los Angeles and going back to Atlanta after graduate school to get married and do theater. Was that a mistake, especially since the marriage didn’t last? Would I have had a career in screenwriting if I had stayed in Los Angeles and given myself a chance? What about leaving Atlanta to move to New York to do theater with my friends? Would I have had more success, long term, if I had stayed put? Once I was in New York, what about quitting teaching to focus on running our theater company instead of merely being a member of it? If I had stayed in the classroom, I’d already be retired and collecting a pension. Or I might have become a principal or even a superintendent. Or what if I had committed to theater more aggressively at that moment, and especially when my first son was born, instead of walking away from that life to be a responsible father and support my new family? So many decisions, so many actions. I know why I took each one and why I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. But was it? Would life have been better, richer, happier, healthier, if I had acted differently?
But I didn’t act differently. I think I fall more into the deterministic camp. I didn’t act differently for all of the reasons why I acted exactly as I did. Those reasons were part of who I was at the time. Character is destiny—because of who I was, I did what I did. Because I did what I did, I continued becoming the person I have became.
In the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter. Yogi Berra may have said that when you come to a fork in the road, you should take it, but Robert Frost was wiser. You can’t take the whole fork. “Knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” Once you make your decision, the only way is forward. There’s no going back. Your life is formed and defined, moment by moment, by each action you take, and life serves up the next question, the next choice you have to make, and then the one after that—fork after fork, branch after branch. You are what you did; you will be what you do. Irrevocable; weighty; it matters.
Ahhh sliding doors theory is one of my favorite and also least favorite things to ponder, but I really like how you ended the piece, and how you feel, that character informs action and we are often where we are because of who we are. The hindsight factor skews the whole thing. And the idea of endless branches kind of kills me perhaps especially because I eat a lot of yogurt and fruit 😂
On other hand there are fifty of me just here in Cardiff by the Sea and I made the decision to have all the Mes here. So what?