There are the big crossroads moments, of course, when a doorway blasts open between the life you’re in and another that will inevitably be very different, and the universe does everything short of hanging up pink neon arrows that flash “PAY ATTENTION NOW.” When I saw my first pictures of St. Paul’s and realized I had to have it, even if it meant going a thousand miles from home at age 13. When I was accepted at Clarion and had to decide whether to quit my job and take out a loan. When I met Nicola. When I said yes to the big job at Wizards of the Coast because I knew it was my shot at someday being able to write full time, even if I had to stop writing while I did the job. When I asked the executive producer to give me the screenplay work, and found myself suddenly, passionately in love with writing again. Those were doors.
It’s easy to play the game with those big moments: Oh my god, what if we’d never met, what if I hadn’t made it work, what if I’d been too scared or too sensible or too damn stupid to (any number of things)? But writer/columnist/yoga guy Mark Morford plays a more subtle game in this post over at SF Gate: not Monday-morning-quarterbacking the life you have now, but rather trying on a life that you see walk past you on the corner, or at another table in the restaurant, or in a parking garage… shrugging yourself into it for a second not because it’s so different from yours, but because somewhere inside is that tiny voice of recognition, of connection, of There I am again.
And he’s right: it’s a good feeling. It was nice to be reminded of it; and to imagine, for a moment, what it was like to be Morford standing there watching that guy and his dogs, seeing all those other ways that he — that any of us — might have lived this life.
(Thanks to Jeremy for the link.)
Honestly, I do this all the time.
I used to drive past the old, crumbling brick tenement-type houses in El Paso, the ones with dying potted plants and laundry hanging out, and I’d picture my life in one of those shabby apartments. Just briefly. The visions aren’t always happy ones. I’m imagining, not being sentimental.
There’s an apartment complex out by Boeing field that inspires the same thing.
When Lillian and I go on mini-adventures, getting lost in unfamiliar neighborhoods just to see what’s out there, I imagine living there, having been born there, going to school there, getting a job there, never ever leaving, except maybe going into the City proper to party as a twenty-something.
They take less time to imagine than it’s taken me to type this, but I can’t imagine NOT indulging in those what-if moments.
I do this too with places that feel shabby, as you say, possibly unhappy to me… I guess we all do. What interests me about Morford’s post is that he’s calling out those moments where we imagine lives that we probably would have been just as happy in. But completely different (or certainly very different) from wherever we are now. I do that too, but have never seen it expressed so clearly before. That’s what I liked about his post.