What can you learn to live with?

I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately.

In class this week we discussed a story by Sarah Pinsker, “And Then There Were (N-One).” It’s a fantastic novella that’s a science fiction/murder mystery mashup (which, if you’re an Agatha Christie fan, you clocked from the title). In brief, there’s an interdimensional convention of Sarah Pinskers where one of the attendees is murdered and it’s up to the narrator, an insurance investigator in her own reality named (what else) Sarah Pinsker, to find the murderer. As she does so, she confronts the choices she made in her life and all the roads she didn’t travel down, and considers how her life might have turned out differently.

I always look forward to discussing this story because, for one, I was a big Agatha Christie fan when I was a teenager and devoured her novels. (It may seem contradictory, though, that I never read And Then There Were None.) For another, the story is all about confronting your choices and the myriad ways (or myriad of ways, if you prefer) that your life may have turned out differently. In this case, Sarah (the narrator, not Sarah the writer) can in fact witness how she might have turned out had she turned left instead of right, had she not broken up with that one girlfriend, if she hadn’t saved that little girl.

Invariably, it gets me thinking about the choices I’ve made in my own life that have led me to this moment. What if I’d quit my job and gone to Greece in 2003 like I was planning? Or if I’d taken that job in Prague in 1995? What if I hadn’t gone to graduate school in 2012? What if I’d stayed at the botanical garden instead?

I’ve been exploring the question in my own writing for a while, particularly in one story I’ve been working on for, well, years. Tentatively titled “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” it’s a multiverse story that involves star-crossed lovers and existential survival, which is a bit further afield from Sarah Pinsker’s concept. My main character has to make some tough choices in order to make the leap between worlds, and it costs him his marriage—which was already on the rocks, and accepting a cross-dimensional mission was easier than trying to salvage his relationship.

Thinking about characters who face the consequences and discarded possibilities of their past decisions has me thinking about the moment we’re living in and how often we make choices based on what we think we can stand in the moment, what we can put up with, just how much we think we’re capable of. Everything’s been moving really fast lately, and it’s been hard for me to keep up. It’s even harder to digest every piece of bad news that gets flung on the plate lately. You want to push away from the table—you’ve had enough, more than your fill—but someone keeps pushing your chair back in with you still in it, as if to say, one more bite, and another, and…

How much can you take before it’s too much? What can you put up with until you finally say “enough”?

I’m prone to thinking that I’m doing everything wrong, and when I get into that frame of mind, I look back on the forking paths and wonder if I made the right choice.