Undulations

If the future held infinitely many alternatives; if there were infinitely many choices that we could make about each moment that comes next, why aren’t there any about the past, or present? Why is our world view shaped like a reverse-funnel, where the past is a well-defined trajectory that we have already traced, the present being the only branching point we have any choice about, at all; and future being the infinite unwielding possibility it ever is? Why are the choices that we’ve failed to make, gone forever?

When it comes to intellectual movies like Inception or Source Code, there are usually many ways you can devour the movie - you can concentrate on the intricacies of the plot; you can indulge yourself in the intellectual nuance with which the underlying concept is formulated; or you can simply be lost with the philosophical implications and possibilities of thought-paradigms that the movie leaves open - I usually take the third path, and the past night’s late-night hour with Source Code left me with this question - parallel universes, why not?

Could there be another me that could have taken another fork somewhere down in the road, and is living an altogether different life, probably better? Could there be an alternate version that did not messed up the choices that I did? Perhaps there is, an infinite alternate versions of me having taken different decisions, been different places and done different things. There can be - there are - indeed different ways that I could live the future, why should it be any different for the past?

It’s refreshing, and in a strange sense, consoling to believe that there could be a version of me that got some things right that I didn’t. It’s at the same time, feebly disarming, to realize that the alternate me, is not really “me”, and in that sense; there aren’t many versions of me, there’s just one - ME.