Life is being created moment-by-moment
Transcript of this video:
In his book, Fluke, the author Brian Klaas tells the shocking and tragic story of a woman in the last century in America who comes home, murders her small children, tucks them up in bed and then takes her own life.
He asks us to imagine what it would be like for her husband returning home to this terrible tragic scene.
And then he reveals that that man is, or was, his great grandfather.
I had to kind of pause for a second to try and work out how that could be true.
And it turns out that he somehow went past this tragedy, married again and started a whole new family.
And the author of this book, Fluke, is one of his descendants.
And he says, I wouldn’t be writing this book about contingency, but for that tragic event and a great many others, all of which contributed to him coming into existence at a particular point in time.
And he explains that many of us understand the paradox of time travel, that if we were offered the chance to go back in time, we’d realize that even the smallest tweak we made in the past would have dramatic consequences of the future.
If we went back and had the opportunity to prevent Hitler being born, would that lead to a better world or not?
Because we could never know.
And even small tweaks in the past can lead to people being unborn in the future.
And he says, although many of us grasp that intellectually about the past, we don’t really apply it to how we live our present day lives, because we actually live in a world that is full of these contingent possibilities where small things can change the whole course of our lives.
Often while we’re busy making our strategies and plans.
It’s a head-spinning book.
And I’ve not quite experienced life in quite the same way after reading it.
And although in some ways I suppose it’s quite alarming, I actually think it’s quite exciting because I think it affirms that there are more possibilities in each present moment than we realize.
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
