Of life choices and their consequences
Think of your life as a huge probability tree, would you be where you are today, had you taken a different decision earlier in life?
Hello, friends.
I like to start my newsletter as if I haven’t been gone for months and that I’ve been writing to you consistently.
As I sit and write this down my brain is flooding with thoughts and ideas for things that I would love to share with you and I’m struggling to decide with which one to start. I’ve been writing down random thoughts and musings that have been coming up for me, hoping that I would be inspired enough to write something, but unfortunately that didn’t happen until now. Except, I’m just inspired to write but not really inspired to write about something in specific. So I’m just going to choose a topic and go with it.
One of my favorite movies to watch is an old black-and-white Egyptian movie called أنا حرة “Ana Horra”. It’s based on a novel by the famous Egyptian writer Ihsan Abdel Qudoos and it tells a story of a young woman, Amina, who is living with her aunt and uncle who are very traditional people while she struggles to find her freedom and independence from them and from society’s constraints. When she decides to go to college, much to the disapproval of her aunt and uncle (remember this movie and novel were based in the 1950s when a woman’s primary job was to find a husband and get married), she moves out and into her father’s house. We learn or assume that she wasn’t living with him because her father lives alone and works most of the time so sent his daughter to live with his sister so that she can be properly taken care of. Amina soon graduates college and starts working, all throughout thinking that by that she has achieved freedom. She soon realizes that a person isn’t truly free until they do something that they truly believe in, which she hasn’t achieved through the corporate job she works at. The reason for this being that she reconnects with her old neighbor, which she- surprise surprise!- falls in love with.
The last time I was watching this movie one specific scene struck me and I realize that either it resonated with me very much or it had such a profound effect on me that it’s been embedded in my subconscious and how I view a lot of matters and how I make my decisions in life. This scene shows Amina telling the man she’s been courting (not her neighbor, a different man) that despite him being the perfect man and would be a great husband, she can’t marry him because she wants to go to college and actually fully experience life before having to settle down. She says that she’s afraid that she would resent him and live in regret if she chooses to marry him.
Up until now, I’m trying to figure out if this scene is the reason why I think that way or if this is a mere coincidence and it just goes to show how life can imitate art sometimes. The former probably makes more sense, but anyway. I realized that I was almost put in the exact same position where I let someone I liked go because I feared that us being together might not allow me to live life fully and have different experiences in life in general. It was almost fascinating for me to experience this. I am happy to say that whereas I sometimes think about how my life would’ve been had we been together now, him being a wonderful person, I have not regretted my decision. After all, it is what it is and I still stand by how I saw the situation.
Life can take us in so many direction. It’s a constantly evolving probability tree diagram if you think about it. If you choose go in direction a, then 1, 2, and 3 might happen. If you then choose to go in direction 2, then alpha, omega and delta might happen. This sequence would be very different, had you chosen to go in direction 1 or 3 and so on. Your experiences would’ve been so different and your life would’ve been so different. In turn, you yourself might turn out completely different as a result. So in a way, if multiverses exist, there might be thousands of different versions of us alive, depending on which directions and choices we take in life.
Why am I making this sounds like rocket science, you ask? Great question, Susan!
I guess I’m just putting a reminder out there for everyone, me included, that we are here today because of the choices that we’ve made. We have the friends that we have, because of these choices. We have the jobs that we have, because of these choices. We have learned what we’ve learned, because of these choices. We are who we are today, because of these choices. And all of those things are sources of gratitude. I mean, I can’t imagine my life without some of the people in my life now, and chances are I might not have met them had I taken different choices earlier in life.
And event if you think you’re not grateful for any of the things that I’ve mentioned, then remember that the choice is still yours and that you can change a tiny course to make a tiny or profound change in your life.
And with that, my dear friends, I bid you adieu.
Until we meet again soon xoxo..