Branchings

Sometimes I wonder what could have been had different choices been made, or if there had been other circumstances. Why certain people came into our lives when they did. Why we chose what we did at the time. Where we started out, where we are now and the twisting road we have traveled so far.

Philosophers, poets, thinkers have pondered these things through the ages. How much control do we have? Is it fate? Destiny? Or do our choices—conscious and sub-conscious—determine more than we know?

I imagined my grandfather’s life as a young man through a novel, since I never knew him. As a novelist, I could write him several lives following separate branches, just to see where they’d lead. If I were writing sci-fi, I could have obliterated my life by changing the past to where he wouldn’t have met my grandmother, breaking that chain and forging a new one.

But if a soul’s ready to be born, would it come forth anyway? So, would I have emerged as one of the links in the new chain, regardless? And would I be much different from what I am now?

Looks like another branch to follow…

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
-- Albert Einstein

One is sorry one could not have taken both branches of the road. But we were not allotted multiple selves.
-- Gore Vidal

Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe