I know: given the threads I've been starting recently you all probably think I'm on something, but you know, I think about weird stuff, see? And I've had more than one occasion to wonder how something I did would have turned out in another universe, if the theory that there are an infinite set of universes where every possible eventuality of our lives plays out, holds true.
Two examples spring to mind: the first has a handy diagram! Stop laughing at my pathetic drawing skills! Stop it!
One day I was on my way to work. My office was in an industrial estate, and to get to it I had to cross a few roads and pass other buildings. One of these, DHL, is just down from my road and as I came to the crossing there was a big truck waiting to go. So I thought, will I just leg it over before he moves or will I wait? I decided to wait. Whereupon a ****ing bat out of hell driver came screaming down the road, did a totally seamless S-turn without looking and screeched into his parking space. Had I started to walk I was dead. He could neither have seen me nor stopped in time. I would have been all over the road. It shook me up, I can tell you, that one decision like that probably saved my life. But in some alternate dimension, did I make the other decision and die?
The other thing that comes back to haunt me was a few years ago when I was in my sister's bedroom upstairs and she was screaming about a bluebottle in the room. Doing what I always did, I opened the window and tried to flick it out the window with a shirt or something. The sleeve caught a snowglobe that was on the windowsill and it tumbled to the ground, smashing, just as two kids walked by outside under the window. Jesus! Had that fallen OUT instead of IN those kids were probably dead, or very seriously hurt at least. I often wake up sweating about that one, and how, in another universe, that precise thing did happen.
On such tiny decisions, and the vagaries of fate and chance, can your life change forever.
Anyone else have "near-misses" or wonder what would have happened if...?