growing in the goo

Months ago I was sitting at the dining room table having dinner with Anon. We were eating Bertucci's pizza, just enjoying each other's company before we went on to do our own thing(s).

In a fanciful mood, we were talking about the past, and all of the different decisions that we had made that had brought us up to that moment, eating pizza with a neighbor in the fading sunlight of a Friday evening. I said that if I hadn't worked on the paper, I probably would have gone abroad. And if I had gone abroad, I'd be fluent in French right now, and possibly living in France. And imagine that - if one little thing had been different, the path of my life would have adjusted by degrees, and I wouldn't have been having dinner with him.

And he reflected on the choices that had brought him there. And it made me think - what if, no matter what the choices we had made, we were meant to be having dinner with each other that day? If the people that are in our lives, they are meant to be there at that moment, regardless of the time or place. I told him my little "We could have been eating pizza in Paris" theory, and I'm pretty sure he thought that I was delusional.

Today my bro and I checked out Georgetown. I pretty much fell in love and experienced college envy, which is a tad ridiculous. I began to think...if I had gone to Georgetown (changing my past so that I had applied, been accepted, etc.), would my life be different? Or would I still be working where I work, living where I live?

And if I had gone abroad - maybe I would still have the same job. TK took the study abroad route at Catholic, and we work together. You really never know.

All of this isn't to look back on things with regret, and with what-ifs, but just to explore different avenues. The Unbearable Lightness Being talked about coincidences, and how a series of them had brought two people together. Maybe those coicidences are secondary to the cause. And tonight on Lost, they said "Don't confuse coincidence for fate." Maybe those coincidences don't matter at all.

One of my favorite books is Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman. Each chapter relates a different way time might operate, and is relayed in usually-gripping stories. Sometimes I picture time as a constant thing - that each action is replayed over and over in some dimension, leaving tracks. For example, after we moved, I began to walk to work from the metro by a different street, but my new and old routes eventually join a couple of blocks from the front door.

My timing is still exactly the same, and occasionally I fancy that I run into my past self, walking the same track at the same time. If I looked quick, and in the right way, would I catch a glimpse of last year's me turning the corner? When we move through the world, do we leave pieces of us behind?

Today Bub and I visited CUA. He jokingly suggested that I pop by my old dorm, and knock on the door. Laughing, he said that I might run into the 2004 version of me and my roommates. Ludicrous, yes. But what if I had knocked on the door, and no one answered? Would I remember a time from senior year when I was in the apartment, doing the dishes (or more likely catching up on Laura's "Us Weekly"), thinking that I hear a knock, and then thinking that I had been mistaken, thereby not answering the door?

There's a short story by Jorge Luis Borges called The Garden of Forking Paths.

It winds down with this quote:

"He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time."