The Parallel Paths
I recently read My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan. The opening was fantastic, but then… well, let’s just leave it on the positive: the opening was fantastic. There was also a single bright moment towards the end of the book. The main character needs to make a choice. She makes the choice, and then says this on page 316:
I can’t finish. I choke up. It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.
We’ve all made choices in life — maybe the best possible choice in a difficult situation — and had to continue on the path knowing the road not taken is running parallel to the one we’re on.
It makes me think of when you’re taking the Jersey Turnpike, and you see I-295 through the trees. You’ll forget about the other road, and then the trees thin for a moment and you spot the other cars on the road not taken. The two roads aren’t perfectly aligned; at times they go off in two different directions. And then you glimpse the other road again.
I made a choice to stop treatments the second time. It was the best choice in that moment; we got on our right road. It doesn’t erase the other one.
6 comments
This reminds me a lot of the play “Rabbit Hole” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Hole) with the premise of parallel lives based on paths not taken. When life is going well we tend not to think about those other paths, but the “what if’s” come when our current course gets bumpy.
I can relate to this quote as it’s often hard making decisions knowing the alternative is just as viable an option. Fear of regret can be very painful.
Oh — oof. This reminds me of a new book I read about and am waiting to read (waiting because I’m on the waitlist at my library to get it) — Thinking in Bets. Which as I understand it talks about how we make decisions based on expected/hoped for outcomes but don’t have a good understanding of/intuition for the way a decision may have been the “right” one (high or best probability to lead to the outcome we wanted) but still lead to the “wrong” place (a lower-probability outcome is what actually results from what we chose).
Funny you mention this now, I was just recently thinking myself about my (relative) willingness to give up on trying for a sibling and how things might have been different … better, or worse, who knows … than they are today had a made a different choice.
This makes me tender for you and tender for me. Sigh…
Your road analogy makes me think of all the random highway designs that have surprised me over my lifetime – from the el train suddenly appearing next to me on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago (I wasn’t expecting THAT!), to the interwoven lanes where cars are traveling in a direction opposite of what you would think (Interstate 40/64 in St. Louis). So, maybe things are parallel for a while, but suddenly they veer off in a weird way.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by.” But yes, we still catch glimpses of that other road & wonder, sometimes…
Ooof. That other parallel path is not erased, even though the one you’re on is a good one. I think about that, too. Sometimes it smacks me in the face. I love your analogy that sometimes it’s not visible, and sometimes you snatch glimpses.