Chance vs Cost

Have you ever had a glimpse of what your life would have been like if you had taken a different turning at some particular crossroads in your past? I had, and it made me believe in the existence of parallel universes. The vision of me following that other route that I didn’t take was so tangible that it actually continued a particular life of its own. Its purpose, I am guessing, is to ring a warning sign in my unconscious mind.

Let me give you an example of something that happened a few weeks ago. A simple story: I met a guy, I liked him, he liked me, we went out a few times. But, there was something that disturbed this simplicity – a faint foreboding which like a whiff of draught snaked across my skin whenever I thought about him. I took notice but still refused to give too much competence to such involuntary sensation.

A slight digression: this is all taking place after I told a good friend of mine that if there was anything I would want to see invented, it would be an in-built mechanism that could warn us about whether things and people were good or bad for us. She said to always watch for the body sensations! These are important because they are NOT easily manipulated by our conscious/rational mind and so might reveal something that we know only intuitively. There are other ways in which this voice talks to us.

It turned out quite quickly that my foreboding was well grounded: the man was hiding a rather important fact about himself, which is that he was married but pretended otherwise. At one of our dates, as we sat in a cosy Italian restaurant, I took a photo of him. I forgot about this photo and rediscovered it the other day when I was cleaning up my memory card. I looked at his deep brown eyes, little wrinkles giving away a flirtatious smile and I felt a twitch of sadness. Too bad it didn’t work out, I really liked the guy, I thought to myself. Then, I looked closer: in the blurry background of the photo, there was a green sign FIRE EXIT. It was placed in a really funny way, almost hanging above his head with a slight shadow cast over the word ‘fire’. So all I could see was this loud warning: EXIT.

And exit I did. Well on time this time. Could it really be that I was unconsciously giving myself a hint about which turning to take?

That EXIT sign made a complete believer in the power of the unconscious mind out of me. It also resonated with a quote from the Matrix Trilogy that I couldn’t understand until just now. The Merovingian said: ‘When some see coincidence, I see consequence. When others see chance, I see cost. And so I follow myself in the parallel universe in which I do end up with the brown-eyed lover, and I wonder how much that would have cost me. I know the EXIT sign was no coincidence.