This prompt brought to mind the book Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. I borrowed it from the library in college and absolutely loved it. That’s saying a lot since I’m usually not one to be entertained by speculative or science fiction, although I don’t know that this book fell in that category. Still, this one really captured my fancy. I have yet to stumble upon a copy in a used bookshop (my usual book shopping haunt), so I haven’t had the opportunity to read it again in the last 30 or so years. <– (a little depressing to acknowledge that college was this many decades ago)
Anyway, the book is a fictional collage of time-oriented stories dreamed by Einstein while working in a patent office in Bern. As a brilliant young man coming up with his theory of relativity, he pondered the many possibilities of time’s nature. I can recall him imagining that time was circular, which led to people repeating their experiences over and over. Another had time standing still and being visited by parents holding onto their children (love this concept, of course).
The one triggered by the prompt is the idea that time, like space, is three-dimensional, so everything actually has three different but perpendicular realities and futures. I’m not going to detail what one of those alternate realities could be for me. Instead, I’m going to pick a key decision point in my life and muse about the outcome of a different choice.
What if I hadn’t studied European Languages? If I had majored in something else, my social circle would have been different, and I might never have met my husband, whom I met through an orgmate (co-member in an organization) at the French Club. My life would probably be drastically different with some other career and people in my life.
What if I had stayed true to my girlhood dream and studied Creative Writing instead? Would I have pursued the life I imagined as a kid? Would I have ended up in Greenwich Village, pounding away at a typewriter (or a word processor – it was the ’80s), trying to come up with a bestseller while forced to listen to the neighbor playing the saxophone on the fire escape (like I said, it was the ’80s)?
Not that this picture is likely to have ever been realized. By the time I was of working age, it would have been the late ’90s. Everybody was already using computers, and public-access Internet was already a thing. I was 23 when Y2K anticlimactically happened.
Anyway, I did choose to study Spanish and French. I did join the French Club. Somebody did introduce my future husband to me, and here I am now, a writer (I suppose that was simply in the stars) with a Spanish teacher past, still in her hometown, blessed with three wonderful children, legally and spiritually bound to a man with whom I have shared almost 30 years of my life, together celebrating milestones and triumphs, as well as weathering two decades and counting of marital challenges and many more of life’s growing pains…
And if you want to read some of my anecdotes from this particular reality, here are some friend links to a few I have published on Medium.
This Small Life 