Everything that has happened started somewhere. Everyone’s current position in life is the result of decisions, random occurrences, chance encounters, and experiences breeding experiences. Each pivotal point, from trivial daily experiences to significant life-changing events, redirects your life’s path in some way. It’s like shooting a ball into a pinball machine, the ball being your life and the obstacles being the pivotal points that change your direction. This observation is a no-brainer. If someone is alive and trying, something has to happen to them. It’s impossible to avoid experiences. But what keeps me in a constant state of imaginative anticipation is the simple reality that you don’t know the significance of something as it’s happening. People are married. People are in prison. People have kids. People win the lottery. People die at young ages. People are divorced. People set world records. People make new life-long friends. People create new profitable businesses. Most of these can be traced back to the very point in time that the subsequent life-defining event began. You can locate the instant that sent the ball rolling toward that seemingly inevitable final result.
All married people met somewhere. Everyone was alive the instant before they died. Everyone was free before they were arrested. Every lottery ticket was just the next one until it was a winner. That’s what makes life so crazy. You don’t know for sure what will happen ten seconds into the future, or where exactly that big break or new life partner will come from. But if one of these things happens it starts somewhere. And that’s what I like to have fun with: looking at current experiences as though they’re hindsight. It works because most things have an air of inevitability after they come to fruition. Of course they were going to be your parents. Of course America was going to win the Revolution. Of course Brad Pitt was going to be famous. These are such things we don’t even think about. They seem obvious and in-line with the flow of history. But they’re not. Not at the time they weren’t. Your parents easily could not have met. America at times was all but defeated by the British. Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma to a high school counselor and a truck company owner.
In real-time, who knows when a girl will meet her future husband or when or if a singer will get a hit song? Nobody does. But it can happen at any instant. That’s what makes looking at life through an inevitable hindsight lens fun. Every girl you meet could be your future wife. Meet a girl, shake her hand and get her name… future wife? That could be construed as psychotic, but guess what? Every married couple met somewhere. And when they met, little did they know the ball was fast rolling toward their inevitable marriage. All the anxiety of the first date, the never-ending waiting period for a call back, the timidity of the first physical intimacy—all obvious in the end. They liked each other, duh! Every time you’re out in society you can run into her—anytime. Every time you play a set at a dive bar could be the show that makes you famous. All singers were given a chance by someone. That night she was in the audience and witnessed the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard. It could be a woman who is well connected and points the spotlight towards you. You never know. You never know when or if that life-changing moment will occur. That’s what makes life worth living.