Me and my friend were running the other day and the conversation went to a “What if?” place. What if we never left our hometowns? What if I never picked him out of a random list of people to help me in the army? What if I picked York University and not Manchester? What would life be? Where would I be?
I don’t know if you, the reader, ever wonder that but it really feels like looking through a crack to a parallel universe. One where I never left my hometown, one where I was maybe living in Athens, never found passion in running or met my partner or my roommate and best friend in university. One where I spend time with other people. A different life. Feels like looking through a crack of space and time and observing a totally different person.
And yet… And yet maybe as humans we have some core characteristics within us that will lead us to a very similar path. What if our habits and our natural tendencies would lead us on the same path, just in different times? What if all the me’s and you’s will meet in the end of the road anyway?
What I’m really try to deal here is chaos theory and specifically the butterfly effect. Looking to your past and thinking how a small change, at any point, would have fundamentally changed everything. The people, the places, you. This type of change is so big and profound that it’s scary even thinking at it. It really is like looking into the abyss. And if you look into the abyss, maybe, the abyss will stare back. I suppose this is the main reason when people say “Oh I wouldn’t change a thing”. Oh Nietzsche!
What did Nietzsche wanted to say though with that? We’ll never know for sure but I like this part from an analysis from a stranger on the internet:
The healthiest human being, Nietzsche thinks, is one whose sheer love of life is so powerful that he or she enthusiastically desires the eternal repetition of everything that has happened and will happen – good, bad, and evil.
Where does that lead us? I don’t know but surely I’ll keep trying to be enthusiastic about loving and desiring everything that life brings. The good, the bad, the evil. I hope the other me, in the other universe, in Athens, or wherever, does the same. I hope you do too.