Hey there Reader,
Right now, Ben and I are watching the second season of Dark Matter.
The jury is still out on this season, with the exception of episode five, which I loved, but the premise still has its hook in me.
Like many of us, there are major decisions in my life that I’ve looked back on, sometimes only fleetingly, sometimes more often, and wondered what would have happened if I, or someone else, had made a different choice.
What if I hadn’t left my mum’s house at 15 to live with my dad?
What if my dad hadn’t kicked me out a little over a year later?
What if I had accepted his offer to go to boarding school instead of insisting on living on my own?
What if I hadn’t had my son at 19?
What if my son’s dad and I had stayed together?
What if I hadn’t married the man I met while I was pregnant?
What if I had stuck with my doctorate and made a career in anthropology?
What if I had stayed in Australia?
What if I hadn’t married my loathsome second husband?
What if I hadn’t let my matchmaker friend give Ben my number?
And those are just the big decisions. The ones where you can almost see the road splitting in two.
Multiply those by all the small ones and there must be countless versions of a life I could have lived.
In Dark Matter, the different versions of Jason we meet want different things from their lives. What looks like a “better” life depends entirely on which version you ask.
I think we do something similar.
When our lives aren’t quite what or where we want them to be, we can be tempted to play the what-if? game.
What if I had stayed?
What if I had left?
What if I had said yes?
What if I had said no?
We imagine the alternate life as though we know how it would have turned out.
But we don’t.
It might have been much better.
It might have been much worse.
All we can know is that it would have been different.
One night, as I lay in bed, listening to the sound of wind in the native bush and the crashing of waves against the shore, with my husband and dogs all snoring around me, I thought:
What if this is my best life?
And then, not long after in one of those moments of synchronicity that often find me, I came across a piece of art by Amanda Jones that said:
In another universe, I am dreaming of this life right here.
I think of that piece often (and yes, it’s on my wish list).
How differently might you look at your life if you knew that somewhere another version of you could only dream of having this one?
🪞 Something to consider
The lives we didn’t live have one huge advantage over the one we did.
We get to imagine them.
We can give our alternate selves great sex, impressive careers, perfect mothers-in-law, and fat bank accounts, and reality never gets a chance to interfere.
✨Try this
Think of one of your own what-ifs.
The decision you occasionally revisit. The road you didn’t take. The life you sometimes imagine might have followed.
Now, instead of imagining how much better it could have been, remind yourself of the other truth:
You have no idea.
Then look at the life you have now.
What exists in it because of the particular, messy sequence of choices and circumstances that brought you here?
What in your life might another version of you look at and think, I so wish I had that?
💭 A final thought
Don’t let the what-ifs of your imagination make you overlook the beauty of the life you have.