All it takes is an instant for everything to change.
From a fatal accident to the serendipity of meeting a life partner or friend and changing the entire course of your life and the lives of those around you.
You blink and the moment is gone, laying in a hospital bed with your children and grandchildren all grown up around you, thinking of all the decisions you had made, all the possible lives you could have led. Could you have done anything other than what you had done, or is that just a convenient illusion? Are we just passengers on a train with a fixed course?
Setting the mood
I aim to make my articles multi-sensory experiences - leaning into quotes, imagery, music and videos to set the piece's tone. On top of this, I hope this curation can expose you to media you enjoy.
“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
― Philip K. Dick
The winding road
You think back to the first moment you met your partner; if you hadn’t been in that place at that time, where they just so happened to be, if one of your moods were different, if you said or did something else, you may have never spent a lifetime together - you would have never met all the wonderful people in their life, your children would have never been born.
Would you have been as happy or happier if you had decided to take another route? If the tracks had shifted ever so slightly? Visions of people and places rush through your mind as the morphine circulates through your bloodstream.
Ghosts shutter like holograms as you think back to the people you have lost through suicide and drug overdoses - if they had never gone down the rabbit hole on that one fateful night, would things have been different? Is there anything you could have done?
You think back to all the people you have lost throughout your life and all of the things that were left unsaid; you reminisce over the last time you saw them, the people you grew apart from. But, did you ever realise that was going to be the last time you saw their faces or felt their touch?
All the lives you could lead
Your mind flickers as you see yourself standing at the farthest reaches of space; you think of all the adventures left undone, the people and places you were never present for, the people you will be leaving behind.
You feel your heart becoming tighter; your vision begins to distort as you experience a kind of violence that the darkest recesses of your mind couldn’t have conjured.
You open your eyes and reconstitute yourself; you’re a woman standing in a gallery staring at a painting of the older man you thought you were. The lifetime of an ancestor experienced; an identity shattered but recorded for future generations. You walk over to the next painting, and life begins again.
