Well Shit…

So I just finished Rules of Civility and it really made me reconsider a narrative I’ve been championing for quite awhile – a narrative I’m not quite sure I want to give up.

And so now I’m curious what you all think!

I generally subscribe to the idea that each decision we make has a ripple effect on what happens next and what happens next and what happens next.

Think Gwenyth Paltrow in the 90’s movie Sliding Doors. (Great flick if you haven’t seen it!) It follows her character through two different storylines – one where she catches the metro and one where she doesn’t. The film flips back and forth in short segments showing us how a split decision changes the outcome of a life.

Or if you are a Broadway fan think If/Then (an all time fav of mine). This is basically the movie above set to showtunes 🙂

But last night as I was finishing Towels super smart novel, I read the following passage from the epilogue and I got to wondering which narrative feels more ‘true’ to me today.

The passage reads:
“It is a bit of a cliche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time – by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions – we draw a card, and we must decide then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come” (323).

Or maybe these options aren’t so different after all. What is the differnce? The amount of decisions we truly get to make? How often we get to make them? How many of these decisions truly impact our lives in ways that feel substantial?

Oh god, now I’m spiraling down a philosophical hole…someone throw me some ‘lines’.