What if?

I know... another 'what if' right? But check this out, what if today is the day that you hear the song that changes your life forever?
What if today is the day that you miss the bus and you hear on the news that it caught on fire minutes after you missed it?

It's an empty feeling, as if I'm missing or lost something. It's the realization that we are, at best, living only a tiny fraction of our lives. It is often simple things - I could have gone here first, before going to work/school - or a life-altering decision - what would have happened if I hadn't moved here?

We are living only a slice of life, one filled with mistakes, knowledge and joy but what if I lived another slice or chose another path? How would I be different?

An idle thought that often drives me insane.

To put it in perspective, imagine a giant fractally generated tree, such as the one you get by doing a Google Image search on [fractal generated tree].

Now imagine your death as a dot on the far end of a branch stemming from the millionth iteration of the tree.

The rest of the tree is what you could have done. Your measly little path to your death-dot is how it played out.

There's a lot of choices to be made, but be happy with the ones you do make. Don't regret the paths you missed; there’s too many choices ahead of you to fret over the ones long gone.

Did you ever see the movie, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl'?

Jack Sparrow: 'The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do.'

That's the trick of it. Most people don't succeed because of fear of trying, and when they do they give up after the first failure.

John Lennon said, 'several hundred songs hit the floor before the first song we liked'

Only 12% of Ronco's patents ever made a profit.

Win by velocity, love. If you try a million things, one is bound to stick,
and if ya lose, it's just practice.

'What if' is what oft keeps me awake at night. That is when I'm most contemplative, and it takes me a long time to wind my mind down (unless I spend an hour before hand in meditation, which I rarely am able to do due to the noise level in this household). 'What if I hadn't moved out of my dad's two years ago. What if I had said something instead of holding my tongue' They are nice exercises of the brain, I think, and are essential to who we are as a person.

Just think, if we never reflected on the past like that, would we have learned from our good - and bad - choices as well as we have? I'd like to think that if I wasn't plagued by 'What If's', I most likely wouldn't have chosen the path that has taken me to where I am today.

And as much contemplating as I do about it, I would not want to go back in time and change things. It just gives me the shivers. I probably wouldn't be here right now, or have the same friends, or have the same habits. It gives me the shivers because of the Chaos Theory - more specifically, the Butterfly Effect. (Looking for the wikipedia article, I stumbled across a Butterfly Effect 2 I hope they do a good job with the movie.)

I could go on with one 'what if' in my head for days on end, having to stop only before I feel like it's going to drive me into madness. I find it enjoyable to think about it, especially if it invades your dreams (quite strange experiences in themselves).

If time travel were possible, I would be afraid of our future as a race. So many people jumping in time, it would be chaos. And to think that, what if Hitler had the time machine technology? Or what if a present government had it, and used it to alter the past to gain favor in the future? Think a corrupted version of the cops in Minority Report.. that alone would make me shiver. Things could quickly be 1984-like, or worse. Those are more 'what if..' thoughts that pass through my head. Our future instead of past.

I find it all intriguing and scary at the same time. There are so many possibilities.

What if is a question that is pondered by all curious and broadly thinking minds, but the problem of such questions in their broad sense, as discussed on this page, is that they do nothing but breed frustration because they consider the possibilities of the past through alteration of events that cannot (for the better) be changed. Because even the smallest alteration of the past could have limitless possibilities in their effects later on, making any sort of hypotheses is impossible.
Thus, it is futile to consider such things. But do not misunderstand me in my statement. We should not ignore the past; in fact it should be studied very meticulously, but not to know what to do, but rather what not to do.
Because we do know our actions, and their effects up until this point, we should look to the past as a sort of guide book for future decisions and not as an endless maelstrom of possibilities, probabilities and false conclusions.

Besides, control of 'destiny'(or whatever) is fool's errand.

Suppose I cloned you (your DNA, chemical makeup, yeah?), and took your clone back in time, replaced you with your clone.

Do ya think your clone would live it's life any different than yours, or would it be carboncopy?

Same choices, same DNA, same life. Period.

'but what if I lived another slice or chose another path?'

...simply, there isn't one.

So the answer be this. There is only one life, yours.

Make it a good one.

Aequam servare mentem.

This post is a compilation of another post and comments by many others.