There’s only one time in my life which I occasionally look back on and wonder ‘what if’?
Winnipeg, Canada, 1976.
I was 19 and had recently split up with my boyfriend of two years (we had been living together) and I suddenly decided that I had to move to New York. I’m not sure why, but this was a time when New York was quite magical, or was being portrayed as such in films, books, music, art…
And so, I moved in with a friend temporarily, put my few belongings into storage and was all packed and ready to go, planning to stop off to visit an old friend living near Toronto before going on to New York. I had no idea what I was going to do there. Didn’t know a soul, had next to no money, though as it turned out this was to become a pattern I ended up repeating more than once later on in my life.
Then, shortly before I was about to leave, I was out for a walk and passed a house where I knew my ex-boyfriend’s best friend was now living. I’d never met this friend as he’d been away at a private mental hospital in Topeka Kansas until recently, the same one James Taylor had gone to and had apparently met ‘Susanne’, for whom he later wrote Fire and Rain. But I digress.
It was late spring and I saw someone working in the front garden and he looked up – I can’t remember who spoke first – and that was it. Not only did I not move to New York but I immediately moved in with him, my ex-boyfriend’s mentally unstable best friend, and married him three months later. Now that turned out to be a disaster, but thankfully it didn’t last that long. A year or so later I had left him and moved on . . . but by then my dream of moving to New York had died.
But what if I had moved there? What would I have done, who would I have met, what totally other experiences would I have had? How totally different would my life be now? I do sometimes wonder. It’s not a feeling of regret, per se, more just a curiosity that I know will never be satisfied.
Years later, when I was 32 and had been living in Toronto for several years, I suddenly felt like I had to move to Spain. It was the same inexplicable desire that I had experienced about moving to New York – something inside me just knew I had to go there. Only this time I did it. Well, I was 33 when I left Canada and took a bit of a detour (a year and a half in Bristol, England) before getting here. And the first day I arrived in Spain, driving down from England with a friend, it felt like coming home – I knew that I was home – and that feeling has never left me.
Any other crossroad stories out there, when you zigged instead of zagging, so to speak?
casa azahar 
What a great topic!
When I was a lot younger I had an obsession to go and live and do research in a tropical rain forest. There was a conference on at Leeds University about the rainforest. I booked a place. It was quite scary being surrounded by all these scientists from all over the world. I attended the lectures, went to group meals etc. I got friendly with two scientists. One from Holland and one from Canada. They were both looking for assistants for their planned projects. The Dutch guy was going to do research in South America, and the Canadian in Papua New Guinea. Yes pretty far apart but both in the tropics. I exchanged addresses with both and went back to my boring job.
Within a few weeks I heard from the Dutch guy. Funding was secured, it was all systems go. A few months later I found myself with him in the middle of virgin rainforest in French Guiana. But oh dear it was awful, one disaster after another interms of the practicalities, too numerous to mention, and I quickly realised I was stuck in the middle of a hostile and alien environment with total bastard nutcase. I returned to the UK, greatly traumatized with a loathing for anything to do with rain forests. And what did I find? A letter from the Canadian inviting me to Papua New Guinea. I can’t remember now whether I even replied.
Now the thing is, when I’d originally met these two guys, my sixth sense had told me the Canadian was basically a good guy and the Dutchman wasn’t. But I ignored my sixth sense because of my desperation to go to the rain forest.
So yes, I always wonder what would have happened if I’d gone to Papua New Guinea with the Canadian intead…..
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Fanny, your story reminds me a bit of that film – can’t remember the name – about three letters that go missing and are finally delivered about 30 years later, and how the lives of those people would have probably turned out quite differently had they received the letters at the time.
Really, our days are full of chance events or trivial-seeming decisions that end up affecting our lives in a big way. Like, the day I happened to find The Salmon of Doubt in a bookshop here, which led me to h2g2, meeting Nog and many of you. I kind of shudder to think where I’d be now if I hadn’t gone to into the bookshop that day…
But of course you can drive yourself batty if you think about that stuff too much, though I do like ‘crossroads’ stories, where there was a definite choice made between two or more options.
Imagine if we could actually see a parallel universe version of our life as it would have turned out if we had taken the other road.
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My crossroads was choosing marriage over my career. I can’t help but wonder, “What if…”
But………I have another crossroads coming up when I retire, which won’t be that many years away. Maybe we never get too old to follow a dream. I hope that’s the case. 🙂
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I know it’s fascinating. It’s good that you have also given an example of a good route taken, how you got into h2g2 and met Nog. I have plenty of those too. And even the ‘wrong’ choices were partly good in terms of ‘learning’, as I’m sure you’d agree. Yeah I suppose it’s ultimately what makes life wonderful that we can’t know and control everything. So it’s always an adventure.
Yeah it would be really fun if we could see a parallel universe. Maybe that’s what makes people write?
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I’ll keep thinking about this one, to see if I can narrow it down to one or two events. Really, every day has the potential to be a crossroads-type thingy.
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My problem with crossroads is that I dither for so long that the roads grow over.
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😀
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I’m not sure if I could narrow down my life’s events to one or two crossroads either… my life seems to be a series of flukes and “accidents”- the best laid plans and all that- which always somehow work out for the best in the long run.
I never, if you’d asked me 10 or 20 years ago, would have imagined myself where I am today, nor would I have “chosen” some of the experiences of the past, but if it meant I might not be where I am, with K, and happy, I would not change a single thing.
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Always listen to your intuition.
My biggest crossroads happened when I went to a chamber music camp in Long Beach after I had become an organic chemistry lab tech in a hydrocarbon lab at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Fairbanks. I spent two months immersed in the wonderful literature for String Quartet (and quintet), fell madly in love with my viola teacher, and returned home determined to try to become a professional musician.
I applied myself assiduously to my instrument (the viola), and ultimately was admitted to study at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. My husband at the time stayed in Fairbanks and supported me as I studied this new milieu. I was doing quite well until I developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
I also happened to get introduced to my present husband (thereby hangs a very long tale) while I was living there, and subsequently my life took a turn down a very different trail.
My carpal tunnel syndrome led to retirement from music and everything else that required the use of my right hand, until the tendonitis began to heal. I was looking for a different direction in my life, and a massage therapist making a difference to the health of my wrist and arm made me commit to being a massage therapist, and I have never looked back.
Of course, it is true that every day brings a new fork in the road. So often we do not see the fork until we are years past it and looking back and say “That day my life changed forever.”
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That’s a shame about the music career. But good in the sense that you’re helping people now. Relieving pain, whether physically or otherwise, is a noble calling for sure.
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