This is one of those nights where, for no readily discernible reason, the whole of existence looms before you with striking clarity, and you have no choice but to admit that you are small. It's a terrifying thing to do the first time, but I guess I've gotten better with practice. Tonight, I think about the future, which is similar to the mind-boggling enormity of the present, except bigger and less tangible.
I have a good imagination. I've kept the imagination I had as a kid. Sometimes when I daydream, I feel like I'm watching a movie or playing a videogame. I see things, I hear things, I feel things, I don't know if I taste them. But all of this to say, today I am in a radically different place than the place I will be in another twenty years. I'm in a different place than I will be in five years. That in one. And today, I haven't gone anywhere yet. There are so many things I could do to change the future of my life. Each time I don't have sex there's a chance it kept someone from being born. That's weird to think about. Each human shares genes from two biological parents--that's easy--but when you choose not to have sex with someone else, you decide that the tow of you will have not children--consequently that they will have no children.
How many individuals have made a difference in the world? There's more than one, just pick your favorite. There are more people who aren't born than who are. What would the world have been like ten years later? A thousand?
According to National Geographic "nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical. That translates to 0.5 percent of the male population in the world, or roughly 16 million descendants living today."
The scientists are suggesting that a lot of these Y's are passed down through the ages from Genghis Kahn, the war/sex machine. What if he never had sex with anyone? How many of those 16 million people wouldn't exist?
I bring this up because it's a tangible example of what I'm saying. Each choice, now, does not bear the weight of history--but it will. That's something I'm particularly aware of tonight. Whatever happened to the guy who had just figure out how to take control of the slide rule market? Nothing, that market was demolished by the unpredicted development of the calculator. Nobody even knows what a slide rule is, to say nothing of how to use one.
But for me...who are the people I give up with each decision I make? Where are they now? Do they really not exist in any way? It's better that I can't know--what if I had to choose who did and who didn't receive an existence, and from my own family!
(I'm really making headway into becoming a crazy old man, I think)
Anyway, it's one of those nights where you go back over all of your facebook pictures of the people who loved and who still haven't unfriended you. I don't regret my past, and I think a good future is coming, but I don't know how I get there from here. I guess I'll do what I always do, and make it up as I go along.
In 16 days I leave for a far away place, and I'll be there for a long time. Everything will change when I'm gone, and the people who are so sure they'll miss me terribly, will learn to live with it. And in retrospect, everything will seem so obvious, excepting a few things which will remain unexplained forever. But the potential future will disappear into the actual present, and then the past. (In physics, this is called the annihilation of the wave function)
To stare all of creation, and then all of possibility in the face. I doubt if anyone could ever make a choice again after that. Anyway, moral of the story: unimaginative people get to deal with unimaginative problems. And: no worries. It'll be okay.
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