Choices

Have you ever read any of those fantasy-fighting, role play, ‘choose your own adventure books’? Popular before computer games, video games and the rest of the modern stuff, my sons waited eagerly for the next edition by the authors Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson.

Even now I reread them and remember nudging the boys through them – there was one where the hero is in a maze and I actually drew a map, without which we would never have completed the tasks. In the books there are spaces to jot your progress and artefacts collected down, but we had too much respect for book and used slips of paper – still there after all these years. The reading comprehension has left its mark.

Livingstone/Jackson books give the reader choices, crossroads if you like, where daring and skill are rewarded. A bad choice and you face monsters.

When I am driving a tractor or mowing the lawn of my mind tends to go into overdrive, coming up with brilliant ideas, or not so brilliant – even rubbish. Then again, heaven forbid, I might become all philosophical! The dangers of thinking!

You see, life is a bit more complicated than those role play books, but the concept is brilliant and does mirror real life.

I often mull over what makes us as a species tick compared to the other lifeforms on this planet. Why we do what we do, what motivates us as individuals? Ask someone to identify the wonders of this world, and they will likely mention the pyramids, the coliseum, or any number of manmade structures.

But what about sight? It is a miraculous thing, text books might show the theory of how it works – but to actually see, you think it is your eyes, but that lump of grey matter eh? Hearing, actually all our senses are miraculous and wonders but not separate to other lifeforms. Quantify if you will understanding? Quantify if you can love, empathy, do they exist anywhere other than in humanity? Is Are they explained by science? The same goes for hate, lying and dishonesty.

There should be some logic in all this but logic is not always a happy buddy to philosophy.

Livingstone and Jackson hit on something interesting - choice.

One moment in history for me, was being selected to carry out a forestry contract in Cambodia on behalf of our government. This was back in 1966 and the contract never happened due to the escalation of the Vietnam War, so the choice was taken away from me – forcing me to make other choices.

But it serves as an example. In the first instance I was confronted with two choices; either to go or not to go. Had I gone, the outcomes are impossible to know; because I remained, the outcomes are history.

You walk along a path and arrive at a fork. To the left there are possibilities – good, bad and indifferent. To the right there is a completely different set of possibilities but still – good, bad, and indifferent. All of these possibilities are on the table, all are viable while you ponder.

The moment you make a decision and start off in one direction, all of those possibilities of the other direction that could have been are dead and gone forever.

In the Livingstone/Jackson books you could always go back and try again, but in life everything is moving on, and if you are able to go back, it’s never exactly the same.

A bit like our experience of working in Africa for seven years, on our return, our friends, relatives, colleagues and we, ourselves were still the same people, but subtly different because we had not endured those years together.

I have no insight to the why, how or does it even matter? I just find it fascinating that possibilities can be viable at one moment and void the next.

There is no revelation here (I guess), no answers either, in the end, we have to live with our choices, path – but wait, here is yet another little quirk that is exclusive to humanity, we can regret.