Throughout our lives, we make decisions which change the rest of our lives. Sometimes it is fairly obvious that a decision will end up being significant, but other times we have no idea how much things will change as a result of what we do. Mira went to the same summer camp for years and eventually ended up as the bus counselor on the bus she rode. The bus route was overcrowded and probably should have been split in half to be safer. She told the camp that she wouldn't come back unless they split the bus, and they didn't. So that summer she ended up working at Old North as a docent instead. Which led to her learning to ring church bells. Which is how we met. Some person I don't know and will probably never meet can claim some credit for me meeting my wife. Life is random like that.
When I look back over my life, I can see all kinds of decision paths like that. Some seemingly minor decision sets up a chain of events that eventually changes everything. And I'm sure that there are many more that I am unaware of. A stupid little essay that I wrote in my 7th grade math class because the school board decided that even math classes should have essays was the first step in the process that led to me finishing high school a year early. Which probably changed where I lived at MIT as an undergrad (and possibly even what college I went to). Almost all of my current friends in the Boston area are people that I met either directly or indirectly because I lived at Random. I probably would have met some of them anyway, but who knows? Almost my entire social circle is people that I might have never met if I hadn't written that essay.
While driving north on I-95, I noticed some odd movement in the cars ahead and to the left of me. Then I saw a car that was sideways at the left edge of the road (perpendicular to traffic with wheels down, not on its side).
Some major decisions obviously change our lives. Where we live, where we work, where we go to school all change who we meet and who we spend time with. People tend to agonize over these decisions, as though they are more important. But then someone decides that math classes don't need essays, or that adding a bus is a good idea. And all that careful planning is overwhelmed by the randomness of life.
This seemed like a good time to slow down. Then the sideways car was in front of me. This seemed like a good time to stop. Unfortunately, momentum can't disappear in an instant.
I have been very actively applying for jobs for the past 5 weeks. I'm mostly concentrating on two totally different areas that I think would work well. I know how to connect either of them to my long term plans. I'm not sure which one I like better. One of them probably requires us to leave Boston. There are also some other possibilities that I'm considering which don't clearly connect to my long term plans, but which I can probably manage to make work through creative execution of the secondary backup plan. I'm not actually expecting to have multiple simultaneous job offers, so I will probably take the first one I get, but I might also end up actually getting to make a decision. It's interesting to see how very different the the hiring time scale is for different industries.
The result was a low speed collision between the front right corner of the car I was driving and the driver's side door of the other car. There was a brief period where I thought I would stop in time before I heard and felt the impact.
And then today there's this accident that occurs in front of me and spreads out in a way I don't manage to avoid. When I finished telling the police officer what happened and said "I tried to stop, but I couldn't manage to" he replied with "Yeah, well you're not superman. You clearly weren't at fault." So I guess there's that at least.
But when I thought about it more, I realized that if I had hesitated for 1/4 second, it wouldn't have been a low speed collision. It's likely that the other driver would have been injured. If I had hesitated for a full second, he possibly would have been killed. If I hadn't slowed down at all, then I probably would have been next to the accident by the time his car came across the highway, and it would have been my driver's side door getting hit, and I would have possibly been injured. There was some 2-3 seconds of my life where my actions changed the outcome from me being probably injured to someone else possibly being killed to that person being probably injured to just cars being damaged. Which can be fixed.
Every moment of every day, we are making decisions. Most of the time, we won't know for years which of these decisions will end up mattering. And we never find out about the decisions that would have been important if they had been made differently. But sometimes, we know that a decision mattered right away.
I have this habit of considering what my life would be like if I had done some particular thing differently. It's one of the things I do while I lay awake at night sleeping (I'll explain how that makes sense some other time). But there's a limit to how far I can push things with any kind of certainty. It's easy to work out things that would have prevented something from happening. It's much harder to understand what would have happened if something had been enabled.
The title of this entry is the opening line to the first episode of the TV show "Dollhouse." That show was on track to be my all-time favorite show for the first 1.5 seasons. Then it switched from being a show about some interesting psychology topics into a show about defeating the evil corporate conspiracy. Which is fine, but not nearly as appealing.
