The door opened to a hallway with a few rooms opening up on the left and the right. The hallway led to the living area starting with an open-concept kitchen and stretching into what was a living room a couple of steps further down. There were doors peeking everywhere he looked, some with their lights on and slightly ajar, others tightly shut and maybe locked.
“Are you from around here?”, he asked me as I looked around the paintings on the wall.
“Nope. I arrived yesterday on Amtrak from Spokane.”
“You live in Spokane?”
“Nope. I was there for a couple of months. I lead a kind of nomadic life and typically do not stay in one place beyond a few weeks at best. Thankfully, my inheritance and my skills and my lifestyle can afford my choices”.
“Oh, that must be interesting.”
“Not really. Sometimes I feel like having a more permanent base would be calming. As of now, it seems like a monkey jumping inside my mind, with no place to calm the bubbles that surface with all the jumping around.”
“I hear you brother. Although I don’t really know what it must be like to be constantly on the move. Me – I have been in this place since the past 30 years and I don’t tire of it. There’s still so much to see and do here in this neighborhood.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I have yet to reflect on the winter exhibition of all the trees that line up the Daytona Avenue. Some horticulturist planted it back in the days and it has created quite a draping on the side of the road. Spring and summers are easy because they attract your gaze. But I find looking at trees when they are at their weakest in the winters to be quite revealing. Then there is the stream that runs down the Kafir Trail nearby. There is a nice wooden bridge that is quite rickety but stands up well to the constant pour in the winters. And there’s plenty more…
“Wouldn’t you rather move into new neighborhood, new town, new state, new country, and absorb some more novel sights? Japanese trees blossom during spring and create quite a spectacle. Deodars in Kashmir offer a visual kaleidoscope in the summers. The Sequoias in California are a sight to behold in their majestic lengths. Why would you not travel and behold those sights?”
“Hmm…maybe when I have exhausted what this place has to offer. I must admit though that a lifetime is too short for that. I sometimes feel like I am one with the trees that I meet around here – they are fixed and immobile and yet climbing and reaching up. They are content with burrowing their roots farther and farther down.”
“I admire your dedication to this place. There is something to be said about the rootedness this type of lifestyle can create. I long for a familiarity with a place and its people that makes you feel one with it, and a part of it. I feel like a guest wherever I go, and sometimes even like a parasite when visiting fragile places. But I also feel a pull to venture out whenever I have spent too long a time in one place. A lady in a hostel described this feeling of addiction to venture out into the frontier and I quite agree with it.”
“Yes. That would be a different life for me and my story would be too unfamiliar for me to grasp. But if it works for you, then it works”.
“Yes, exactly. But how would we know if it works for us? There is nothing for me to compare it to. Experiments with rooted living aren’t the same as living. And the moment I give up my current life, the comparison ceases to be apples to apples. Oh, what quandary this mortal life is – if only we could live our lives in strands that branch out into these parallel universes and with us privy to what each of those paths traversed.”
“That’s an interesting thought. I wonder what that would do to the individual forks and how it would affect our choices. We would not be able to retrace our steps and take the place of our alt-histories of course but the information itself would be instrumental in driving our decisions for the future”.
“Hmm, go on”.
“For instance, you could choose to stay in any or all of these places you have been to so far and then be able to see what living, actually living and finding your base, in those cities look like. You will not feel the emotions or live through the experience of it, but it would be as if you are reading a story about this other person – this alt-you.”
“But with the added weight of knowing that it could have been you. Oh, what heavy a weight it would be knowing the path your life could have taken and did not – for better or worse”.
“Sometimes, less information is better than some information.”
“I suppose so. And less reflection or introspection is better than more.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that instead of worrying about our past, and its various forks, we might be better off with the present.”
“I wonder though, if some paths would eventually converge, and if that would relive the stress. I doubt it, for the journey would still be different even though the outcome is the same”.
“And the convergence would be illuminating too, by showing what decisions did not matter, provided we would still be unwilling to trade one experience over another”.
“Convergence will push us towards providence perhaps and end the disgusting tirade about free will and action.”
“Or maybe, it will just give us a better decision-making framework…”
“…and would be a treasure trove of data for the social scientists among us.”
“…and would lead to more hand wringing about decisions and about the life we should design for ourselves.”
“Sadly, yes.”
“I am glad we had this talk. We are better off where we are.”
“Amen to that. “
Jargogled Impressions. 