There’s a video I love to use in class. You may have seen it, because it was making the electronic rounds a few years ago. But here it is just the same—forty-two seconds you’ll never get back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKDiPp2aCQk
I use it because students ask me so many questions that I can’t answer. Like the student who asked me yesterday if she should study abroad in the fall or the spring of next year. I recommended spring, because we’re at the tail end of COVID (hopefully) as I write this, and it’s likely things will be more “back to normal” in spring than in fall. For those of you who work with college students, or who’ve ever been nineteen, you know she immediately gave me all the arguments for why she’s going in the fall and thanked me for being so helpful. …Um… Glad I could help.
But she’s asking more than she knows. If she goes in the fall instead of the spring, she’ll meet different people. The weather will be different. There will be different events and festivals and holidays to experience. She might meet someone who’ll inadvertently send her down a different career path. She might miss something exciting at home. She’ll wind up in different housing, living with different roommates. She’ll take different classes both the semester she's here and the semester she's there… I could go on and on.
The physicists among you are thinking about multiple-universes. As in, there’s an infinite number of universes out there in which every choice she’s making is happening. In one universe she’s going in fall and in another she’s going in spring, and in each, she experiences the consequences of her decision. While that’s deep and makes for epic movie plots, I’ve always thought it sounded like baloney. Wouldn’t it mean every time I choose to brush my top teeth before my bottom teeth, or every time I reach for the Rice Chex instead of the Honey Nut Cheerios there’s another universe splitting off? Every alternative thought I think, another split? If I lead with my left foot rather than my right when I walk up some stairs? My mind’s too small to fathom an infinite number of universes for me AND for you AND even for my cat who is, at this moment, choosing to chew on the miniblinds. If he does or doesn’t stop chewing (or if I do or don’t throw something at him)—a new universe? AND, if right now I'm going to choose to raise my right hand or my left... I picked my left and split off a universe from the one in which I picked my right, doesn't that mean this new universe is all about me (and, for that matter, so is the universe in which I raised my right)? I made it by my choice. So it really is all about me? Hmm…
You’re probably starting to wish you lived in a universe where I didn't digress into talking about multiple universes and stuck to the point, assuming I have one, which I do: It's that there's no way for us to know the outcome of our choices. No matter what she chooses, my student can’t go back (in this universe) and try studying abroad in the other semester, and I can’t un-eat the Rice Chex this past morning and eat Cheerios instead. Our choices—even the small ones—have consequences. Sometimes we love the consequences, sometimes we don’t. But we can’t let ourselves be paralyzed by not knowing the outcomes. (FYI: There's an interesting TED Talk on choice and paralysis by Barry Schwartz!)
What we can do is keep making choices. If we don’t like the consequences of a choice, we can look for other choices to remedy the first one. Assuming we aren’t talking about things on the level of a thirty-year prison sentence or the need to try and stuff a baby back in there, most of our outcomes can be followed up by new choices…which will have new outcomes, necessitating new choices. All this makes life kind of like the instructions on your shampoo bottle: Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Except in life’s case, it’s: Choose, Assess, Repeat. We make choices, we assess the outcomes, and we make more choices.
If our choices suck, we can make new ones. If we hate our work, we can retool for something new. If our relationship isn’t going so hot, we can go to a counselor or spend a nice weekend together or try a marriage retreat. If we're getting fat, we can put down the giant bag of tortilla chips from Costco and start a regular walking routine.
And if we’re going into space, we can hold the beans! ...Speaking of which, I mean, come on. You’re in a tiny ship in space with a bunch of other astronauts and you ate beans?! That guy deserved what he got.