My Own Version of Reality

I've always been a sucker for alternate reality movies - especially ones that offer a "What If" scenario with a romantic twist. It's A Wonderful Life. Serendipity. The Family Man.

My weakness for movies of this escapist genre is simple enough: if most of life's decisions are a toss-up between the inconsequential and the anticlimatic, I enjoy watching movies where picking up a coffee urn without a pot holder yields unrelated-but-far-reaching consequences. This world of Parallel Reality is far more interesting than my own.

Last night, I watched If Only, an ABC Family made-for-tv movie starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. Reason enough to watch it. It was sugar for the first 85 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of swallowing a horse pill. The movie was decent-to-good, but more importantly, has propagated my own travels in an alternate reality.

Additionally, my perpetual internal struggle of Free Will versus Destiny has raised its fickle head again. My intellectual inner voice argues that we are only a sum of our decisions; my bleeding heart lulls me into believing that Fate regularly intervenes to soften the impact of our inevitable mistakes.

I've been going over certain decisions of my life, monumental and seemingly insignificant, and wondering how my life would be different had they not occurred or if I had a chance to go back and correct them. And at the end of the day, I've compiled a very small list of decisions I would have changed. And that, my friend, is a bigger secret than the significance of "Rosebud".

To steal from Sinatra's signature song - regrets, I've had a few; but then again, too few to mention.

Be that as it may, I'm very thankful for the twists and turns, good and bad, my personal decisions have guided me through. Sure, I've escaped a few lion's dens with some bruises and scars; I've also seen some beautiful sunrises from majestic peaks. But in the end, I hope I've come this far with equal or less cynicism than when I started my own path.

And if you've read this far, thank you for sharing this path with me. You are a kind traveling partner; I only hope to reciprocate.