My gran used to say that “if only” was the most useless phrase you could say. She didn’t really say much that was memorable apart from that except for (of course) the killer one that really has stuck with me “I don’t really like boys… I much prefer girls…” which wasn’t some late life sexuality switcheroo, just something designed to make me feel wretched and particularly unwanted one afternoon.
If only she hadn’t said that…
I’m reminded here of one of my favourite exchanges written by Douglas Adams:
“It’s at times like this that I wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was a little boy”
“Why, what did she say?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening…”
She probably forgot she’d even said it almost as soon as it left her lips, but, sadly, I never did forget it. Unfortunately for me, I was listening. Sometimes we forget that even the little things we do have long-lasting and unforeseen consequences.
Which does, of course, mean that when it comes to that little phrase “if only” she was absolutely right (which makes you think maybe she was right about a lot of things. Hmmm…). You have to stick by the choices you have made, not constantly mull over the ones you haven’t. You can only live the life you are living, not the one you wish you were. The people you know can only be themselves and not some other person you’d hope or prefer them to be.
We’re all guilty of wondering about the life not lived or the choice not taken, but it’s hardly the most useful or productive of ways to pass our time, is it? It’s not something we’re ever likely to be able to actually experience, and all it really manages to do is make us more miserable.
Thoughts like “If I’d said this or done that, I’d have a much happier life…” “ If I’d sat down and studied instead of hanging around the park drinking cider maybe I’d’ve left shool with an O-level or two and I’d probably have been master of the universe now…” “If I’d kissed Edna instead of Enid all those years ago, maybe I wouldn’t be negotiating this minefield of a divorce right now….” are all the stuff of daydreams (and sometimes it is just nice to daydream) but they’re just as valid as “If I’d run that red light I’d’ve killed that pedestrian…” or “If I’d ended up running an oil company I might well have spent most of my life in jail”. You really should consider the negative possibilities as well as the positive ones, and a lot of us forget those when we go off in search of our dreams.
If anything it can be quite destructive if we sit around looking at our life and wishing it was somehow different, human beings are quite capable of going off and making it different just to indulge our own little fantasy of how great our life might possibly be and to hell with the consequences or how many real lives we can ruin along the way to our own personal goal of happiness. Regret might well be poisonous to the soul, but so is the pursuit of personal happiness at the expense of the happiness of others.
There is of course another aspect of “if only”; the things you shouldn’t have said, or wished you hadn’t said. Don’t say them then! Sometimes a silent approach will speak volumes and defuse a situation more powerfully than a thousand raised voices. It’s no use walking away from something that got out of hand wishing that you had or hadn’t said something. Perhaps if you ever feel that you want to say something unpleasant you should just “engage the brain before using the mouth”, or learn to live with the consequences of “putting your money where your mouth is”. There are some more useful little clichés that come to mind here “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all”, and “If you’ve nothing to say, then don’t say anything”, both of which I’m very fond of, not least because of the old cliché that clichés become clichés by being essentially true.
In fiction of course, the idea of the multiverse is very tempting. Whilst there are a lot of authors nowadays setting their characters in rather pleasant alternate worlds, many “If only” universes are mostly of interest because they consider the world gone “bad”, which usually means that the world is exactly the same as ours except there are airships and a fascist government and we all get to go round with duelling scars and eyepatches, or indulge our darker fantasies of being our own evil twin (or dressing up our favourite actresses as dominatrices as certain television shows prefer to see it). Sadly for most of us our alternative self might just be driving a better car or (still) married to a different person. In reality we tend to make the safe choice, or the predictable one, and no matter what, our lives would have ended up much the same. It’s very few of us whose lives change on a massive pivotal moment where the world changed forever. Few of us are that significant.
There’s a growing range of historical literature looking at the significant moments of history and wondering what might have happened if things had gone the other way. The problem to me is that they all assume no variables at all right up to the moment they choose to change, which is all well and good, but with the constant fluidity of people and possibilities, you really can only live with the history you’ve got, and there are many roots weaving through the previous years leading up to that position of few options that history actually took. It’s easy to say what might have happened if the reinforcements never showed up at one battle or another, but rearranging enough of history to make that not happen would have infinite consequences elsewhere too. If you get rid of one dictator, another one will always fill the void. The truth is, if you were able to go back in geological time and reset the little silver evolutionary ball rolling again, you probably wouldn’t end up with human beings at all, and this little blue planet might just be a lifeless ball of rock, or a massive jungle or a world dominated by super-intelligent cockroaches. Not that we’d know anything about it. The circumstances of your own birth (THAT conception on THAT night after THAT third bottle of wine…) are so massively improbable that randomly duplicating them through an alternate timeline is almost impossible. There might well be an infinite number of universes where you didn’t eat that extra biscuit that morning, but there would be many more where you never existed at all.
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