For better or worse, we’re a multiverse: Life Hacks by Charles Assisi

With each choice we make, a door closes behind us. Those lost versions of ourselves survive, though, in the risks we take, habits we retain, people we become.

Some days ago, I bought a T-shirt with a line of text on it that stopped me short: “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

René Magritte’s La Decalcomanie (1966): The various selves we could have been continue to shape us, through traces they leave behind and by their very absence too. (WikiArt)

That was Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940).

I have always loved quotes like this one, that linger in the mind. So the T-shirt quickly became a favourite. As an aside, I often slip into the quiet hobby of people-watching. A couple talking softly. A group of teenagers arguing with the easy, lazy confidence one acquires, for a brief while, at this age. A young woman typing furiously (or angrily?) into her phone.

In moments like this, the line on the T-shirt has begun to creep to the front of the mind, with a whispered question: What if you were one of them?

Not in a dramatic “what could have been” way. Just with a sense of paths not taken.

If I had pursued medicine, as I almost did, would I have ended up like a certain doctor I know, a pleasant person whom everyone likes, but who always seems so bored with it all? If I had stuck with the loud, overconfident boys I once spent so much time with, would I have grown into a louder, rougher man myself?

Most of us carry such alternate versions of ourselves around, quietly. Each choice we make shuts the door on other lives.

A single date, one financial decision, a misdialled number… it can be dizzying to think of how large a role accident, chance and circumstance play too, in who we become and the lives we eventually lead.

It must be so much harder, I imagine, for those who live with choices they didn’t get to make. People unhappily married to partners chosen for them. Children who wanted to paint or write but were pushed into mainstream careers. Friends who became engineers because it was one of the first labels they were given; and by the time they realised there were options, it was too late.

They never stop appearing either, the many paths before us. With each choice, more doors quietly close, and I leave behind versions of me that I will never become.

Yet those versions survive, in a sense; in absentia. They show up in small but recognisable ways.

Often, they surface in that simple but intensely human trait of empathy. We meet someone at a crossroads very like one we have known, and find ourselves uniquely placed to lend a hand, a quiet shoulder for grief, or to simply listen and say: “I know”.

They turn up in the mirror too, carrying worries and fears, or a forgotten sense of joy, that date to a long-ago time and a different you.

They turn up in the relationships that matter most to us, when what we learnt, from having loved and lost, ends up making us somewhat gentler, more caring, and more watchful that the loss never recur.

Those other versions show up in the risks we take, and the ones we avoid; in the people we trust and the habits we can’t shake. In the values we protect without second thought.

They help us understand who we are becoming. We owe them recognition.

Maybe living well is simply this: to be present in the life we have, acknowledge the ones we didn’t live, and accept that all of them, together, are still at work, shaping who we are.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)