Quantum Leap

I just looked back at my first blog (5-22-2004), and realized that I missed a golden opportunity for reflection that day.   You see, May 22 is the anniversary of my high school graduation, a milestone that I look back on more and more as the years go by.

If it hadn’t happened the way it did, the year it did, I would probably be a much different person that the one I am now.   Better?   Don’t know.   Different?  Certainly, but I can only speculate on the differences.

If I had graduated, for instance, from the high school where I went through the end of my junior year, I would have never been so anxious to leave that town and head out for places unknown.    Heck, I might still be there now (AAAARRRGHH!!!).

If I hadn’t left there for the town where I graduated, I would have never met the woman who became my first wife…and the mother of my oldest child.    I would never have met the woman who became my second wife…and the mother of my other two children.   And I would have never met my third wife.

And I would have never had to go through two painful divorces, lose the affection of my eldest child, fall into economic ruin, work for fifteen years in a thankless but fulfilling profession, met countless friends, made as many enemies, had so much fun, had so much heartache….etc.

One simple misstep in the past can alter so much.   Ray Bradbury called this “the butterfly effect”.   Step on a butterfly in the past, and for want of that butterfly, a mouse goes hungry; the mouse dies, and does not give birth to many generations of mice, so a larger predator goes hungry, and does not give birth to future generations…ad infinitum.

One can play the ‘what if’ game with life forever…but would any of us, knowing what we know now, really go back and change one cusp of our lives?   Really?

Sometimes I think I would—but then, would I be here writing about it?   Probably not.

But who knows?

And so it goes…