The lure of alternate realities

Woulda/shoulda/coulda is one of humanity's favorite pastimes. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn't screwed up that one girlfriend-boyfriend relationship that has now become my best platonic friendship - if we had gone on to marry and have kids etc., would we still be friends, as we are now, or would we be divorced and hating each other by now? What if I had not found a job four days before I graduated from college and had to go home to use my parents' house as a base of operations while searching for my first "real-world" experience - where would I be today?

Many of my favorite works of art/media are variations on this theme. It's A Wonderful Life is my all-time favorite movie. "The City On The Edge of Forever," "Yesterday's Enterprise" and the film First Contact are among my favorite Star Trek stories. "A Sound of Thunder" is one of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories. The little choices we make every day change our lives forever (How will my taking a sick day today change the man I am in five years, for example?) - as Sara Groves sings in her song "Generations":

Remind me of this with every decision -
Generations will reap what I sow.
I can pass on a curse or a blessing
To those I will never know.

James Leroy Wilson explores these thoughts intriguingly in his post "Butterfly Effect," jumping off from a historian's suggestion that if Chamberlain had died at Gettysburg and the Confederacy went on to win independence, Hitler may have won World War II because the United States would not be big and strong enough to defeat him.

"If Chamberlain died," Wilson counters, "maybe the South would have won. But also and more likely, a Great War in Europe - if one were to happen at all - would have started differently and would have more likely ended in stalemate. It is most likely that Hitler would never have risen to power."

We have no idea how the world might have proceeded if one butterfly fluttered its wings differently, if one choice, one decision, one event was altered - because each different choice would open up a whole series of options different from those made available by the original choice: "It is crazy to suggest that anything that transpired since would have been the same, in large part because zillions of zillions butterfly effects large and small transpired since," Wilson writes.

That's why it makes for such interesting fiction: We all have moments in our lives we wish we had handled differently. But, as the old saying goes, careful what you wish for, you may get it. And don't forget the phenomenon of the happy ending: I lost a girlfriend and gained a lifetime friend, and I'm now hooked up with someone whose personality meshes with mine much more comfortably than that once-upon-a-time match. It wasn't what I wished for; it was better.