"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could"
-Robert Frost
In preparation to work with children, we're taught to present no more than three choices. For children, too many options is crippling. The inventors of Neapolitan ice cream have the psychology here pinned. But really, let's not overestimate our adult selves. Choices can paralyze the best of us. Pressure is placed younger and younger to make decisions that matter; when I was a kid, the first real choice you had to make was where to go to college. Now kids choose specialized High Schools; they pick private Middle Schools. They narrow down extracurriculars to no-more-than-three, they have a voice in custodial hearings between parents, they talk about whether drugs are the best option for behavior management. At each turn, life courses are altered. We can spend whole existences consumed by What If, but we don't. This society doesn't leave space for looking back. So we become, slowly, aliens in our own bodies. Plans go wrong, sometimes delightfully. Our feet go astray, and years later we are unrecognizable even in the mirror. Do you ever wonder about the other incarnations of your What-If selves, locked away inside you, abandoned, underdeveloped, undiscovered?
Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...There would be talk of Germany, Hawaii, places that would open up for
us beyond the post and the army-issue furniture because my entire life
with him was an open door covered in knobs. There would have been
toasts by our closest friends, and everyone would finally be saying how
beautiful we look together. We would have proven that it could work...
Adrian at FearOfLanding.Blogspot.com
...The school day had not even started and my mind was racing. What to do
now? I was struggling with what my options were. I went thru my day
like every other day. But, it was no longer like every other day. Every
time I switched classes I sized up each teacher...
Ryan at RyanOfTheZeitgeist.Blogspot.com
...I have never before, or since,
completely lost my shit, but I managed to extricate myself from the
brute’s clutches, and from that point on I was a raving banshee
lunatic; in my mind, I threatened them with every conceivable horror I
could fathom, but what it must have sounded like coming from my
drunken, screaming mouth I don’t know. It worked, however, as I must
have looked like some rabid, frothy-mouthed maniac...
