If You Could Do It Over Again

I’ve never understood the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game. The premise is that we’ve all made mistakes or done ill-advised things over the course of our lives, and if we could go back in time, which of those embarrassments would we retract? Yes, all of us have made bad decisions or acted in ways we’ve later regretted. What if I would have married that girl I was seriously dating when I was 18 (who wanted to marry me)? What if I would have continued my meager music career instead of going to college? What if I would have majored in Biology instead of English? What if I had gone to law school instead of grad school in theater? What if I wouldn’t have married my first wife? What if my first wife and I hadn’t divorced? What if I would have followed my mentor to Yale instead of staying at Iowa? What if I would have stayed on in business instead of going into teaching? And on and on and on. There are so many decisions and actions we make along the way that shape and direct our lives, some of them obviously of import at the time, most of them seemingly minor. But the fallacy of the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game is that every decision and every act that you make along the way contributes to the way it all turns out. If you pull out any one thread, the whole fabric unravels. Perhaps if you’re a mass murderer, you might be able to play the game in a way to see how things might have turned out in a more positive way (unless you were satisfied with the mass murderer’s life). But if you’re like most people who reach relatively middle or older age in a relatively comfortable manner, there’s no way of knowing how deleting an earlier (seeming) misstep might have altered your trajectory. We are who we are by all of the decisions we make, good or ill, and – perhaps more important – by all the accidents and flukes that come along by chance. We are in the end not arrows, shot straight on a line from bow to a target, but more billiard balls, careening off railings and bumpers and one another and falling somehow, eventually, hopefully, into a pocket.

The Undiscovered Country

I was reading an essay where the writer was reflecting on the best way of leading a religious – particularly Christian – life in order to ensure eternal grace in the afterlife when the following sentence stopped me: “We will all find out when the trumpet sounds.” Will we? Will whatever consciousness we have after we die allow us to hear the trumpet? Will that consciousness possess any memory of the various disagreements about salvation among the religions (and non-religions) through the ages here on Earth? What happens if the trumpet turns out to be an oboe?

This has always been a problem for us atheists. Believers, at the end of any discussion of the undiscovered country, can fall back on the convenient bromide, “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see who’s right.” This is a classic example of “begging the question” – a statement that assumes its own assertion (there’s a conscious life after death) to prove its assertion (that there’s a conscious life after death). But the atheist argument is that none of us will be around in any sentient way to see who’s right. In a void, no one can hear you gloat.

I understand well the desire for a life hereafter where all is good and forever and we’re reunited with our friends and families (hope there are a lot of rooms, especially bathrooms). Human nature – animal nature – evolution – all favor survival, and the extension to survival here on Earth is survival beyond. Why go on, why live a productive and caring life if there’s no point (read “reward”) at the end? Well, maybe the point is as simple as just surviving the life we have briefly here and do good to ensure that human life continues on here, and enjoy it while we have it, and make that imagined “afterlife” the life we’re living now.

What would a void – no space, time, consciousness – be like after we die? I suspect it would be very much like the void we all came from before we were born. Remember? Of course not. That’s the nature of existential voids. You’ll learn to live with it.

Zucchini Redux

Rousseau once wrote “plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose,” meaning “I don’t understand why I have to be dragged into this crap.” Or something close to that. Or maybe it wasn’t Rousseau. Whatever. The point is we all have problems trying to make sense of what the hell is going on around us, both in the day-to-day and in the transcendent. Well, at least the day-to-day. My most recent confusion involves the profusion of zucchini in our garden. Not just zucchini. Giant, corpulent zucchini that apparently hide in waiting for days beneath the elephant-ear leaves of the mother plants before emerging one morning like alien spacecraft that landed in the garden in the silent dark of night. By the time they announce their presence, they are beyond edible vegetables, having become unwieldy zeppelins that would require a skip loader to harvest and a chain saw to slice. And I didn’t even plant them in the first place; they just appeared on their own, albeit from fruit (giant, unmovable fruit) that I had carelessly let go to seed last year, my le péché original. So I live with it. I walk to the garden and look down at the dark-green-turning-yellow leviathans. What am I going to do with them? I could chop them up and dump them in the compost pile. But that would spoil the possibility of them returning next year, of my cursing their monstrous progeny next summer, my questioning my own prowess as gardener and human being, my bitching in general about how screwed life is. No, I think I’ll just let them grow, rot, go to seed, and see what happens next year. More or less the way I deal with my own life.