Have you ever thought about how many opportunities life gives us — and how many of them we (not) realize? Every time we make a choice (to go to the sea or to the mountains, to eat pasta or pizza, to accept or reject a business proposal), we inevitably give up something and we can never know how life would have turned out if we had made a different decision.
Last night I hesitated for a long time: should I go to a party with my friends or stay on the couch with a book? In the end, being a decrepit wreck beyond my years, I chose the second option. While reading, I thought: “What would happen if I went there? Maybe I could meet some interesting people there? Or maybe even someone who would eventually become a part of my life? How to know in advance? It’s completely impossible. During the day, we have to choose every now and then. Sometimes I just break a sweat when I think about all the possibilities of the life that I could live. And you are not tormented by this thought of choice?
Sometimes I think that life is a totalitarian madness. We are constantly subject to the dictates of the only option. But the possibilities are so many, they are just endless! In our personal lives, we sometimes fluctuate between two hobbies, and you never know how things could turn out with another person. Another, failed life becomes a novel that no one will ever write. The same excruciating tension occurs in simpler questions. In a restaurant, we want pasta and pizza, we make a choice, and depending on what we prefer, the tone of the dinner changes. This is a small thing, but the consequences are quite real: we experience different things. If one day I ordered pasta, I’ll never know what it would be like eating pizza on the same day. Okay, I’m writing for Psychologies, a quality, solid journal, so I should probably pick a better example. But still, I find that this moment, when we froze in indecision in front of the menu, is very characteristic of our life in general. We sit and discuss: we could prefer chocolate mousse to everything, but the thought of tiramisu has not left us yet … Now the fantasy of being in several places at once is getting closer to me. Marcel Aimé has a wonderful thing, «Sabina»: there a young woman has the opportunity to live as many lives as she wants *. You could be married and single, get paid and have your own business, go to the sea and the mountains … and at the same time eat pasta and pizza. But would we be happy without this constant need to choose? Wouldn’t we go crazy if life became something like a four-lane freeway? There is a lot of beauty in the need to constantly choose the road to go on., sometimes go astray, inevitably make mistakes, rewrite cleanly and correct mistakes, accumulate exactly what can only be called experience. Experience comes only when we fail, and I want to fail sometimes. I want to lose and regret. I want to lie on the couch, saying to myself: “What if I went to these guests?” Yes, there is beauty in all of this. And now that I can write any ending line, there are so many endings going around in my head…but I still have to choose one of them.
* M. Aime «Engagement» (Fiction, 1979).