Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff

Who you are, here and now, exists only in this moment.  Who you were yesterday, and who you will be tomorrow, are not the same people as the person that exists here in this moment.  Everything that you have experienced, the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it has shaped who you are here in this moment and all that is to come will continue to shape who you are and who you will become.  If I was to meet my sixteen year old self, I don't think he would like me very much, not because of who I have become, but simply because he would not yet have experienced everything that was to come that would make him receptive to the knowledge and the wisdom that I've gained along the way.  People often ask what you would say if you could talk to your younger self, what advice would you give them, to be honest I don't think I could tell him anything that would change the course of his life, he would still make his own decisions in the end even if it meant ignoring me completely.

I say this with confidence because although it is a case of trying to recall what you were like in that moment and recapturing that head space, you can shift this conversation forward and ask your present self, if you were to meet your future self from sixteen years ahead of today, would you actually try and live you life by anything they said?  Let's discard the notions of free will and fate and the conflict between the two and keep things simple.  If your future self told you to change something fundamental about your life, that required you to change almost everything about who you are, would you actually do it?  Would you put in the effort to make that change?  What could they tell you that would make you listen?

The absurdity of the scenario leads us to dismiss the depth of what is being asked, yet when we reflect on our own lives it is that question of foresight that we are contemplating.  I've mentioned before that I think it's dangerous to judge your past self for decisions they made from your present perspective with the benefit of hindsight, because you know what happened next, they had no idea, you can't fault them for not seeing something they couldn't possibly have seen, and yet, when you shift this question to the present and the future, you are basically asking yourself if you would make that change if you could foresee those consequences.

In Greek mythology the epic of Cassandra serves as a warning to those who would wish to see the future, that what you see might not be a benefit to you in the end but rather it may turn out to be the greatest curse you would have to endure.  I've been thinking about the people who have come into my life over the years and those who have left it.  There are some I could have met a lot sooner, there are some I could have met a lot later, and there are some I could conceivably have never met at all.  Contemplating what my life would be like without the impact they had on me that shaped who I am is not an easy thing to comprehend, primarily because you have no way of knowing for sure how things would have turned out.

What I find fascinating however as the title of this post portends, is how close our paths can actually come whilst still never connecting.  I've been in the same room as people years prior to our fated first 'real' conversations, that does make you wonder if in that moment in that room we two had spoke, would we have connected then, or would we not have anything in common at that point that would bind us together as we would be so many years later?  Take it a step further and you can start to pay closer attention to the people with whom you have already crossed paths and how close you have already come and for a moment contemplate where that could lead.

You might be wondering what inspired this post, and why it's been made outside of my regular posting schedule, the truth is rather specific, to the point where it reveals too much about my personal life.  Suffice to say that my path crossed briefly within a few days of a moment in time that could have had a very big impact on my life; the fact I missed it by only a few days has made me stop and stand back for a moment and realise even now that for every person you can imagine their timeline as a sort of undulating tube like the one portrayed in Donnie Darko if you've ever seen that movie, one that twists and turns across space and time, intertwined with that of every other person, and that true to the words of The Doctor, we're all inside "a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff" - and within it, some of us have come a lot closer to each other than we realise.