Tapestry

Note: Some of these blog posts have been composed long before they are written. This is one of them. It - well, the thinking that went into it - dates from before the events of Tuesday, August 12, 2009. If I were to be initiating these thoughts now, I might have a different answer. But...well, see the Afterword.

If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently?

In other words, if you could change some action, some decision, some direction in your life, what would it be?

For the longest time, my answer to this has been the same: Nothing. Each action, each decision, each direction chosen was done, made, or taken for very good reasons - or what I believed at the time were very good reasons. Have I done stupid, regrettable things? Sure. Am I happy with where my life has taken me? Not entirely. Is this the best I could have done? Probably not.

One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the sixth season episode called "Tapestry." It's A Q episode, which probably should have disqualified it from consideration - having a mischievous deus ex machina hanging around in the series, beginning with the first episode and ending with the (excellent) final episode, was just annoying to me, and a potentially fatal flaw. (What is the point of anything if this guy could pop in at any time and change everything?) And while the presence of Q is necessary to the story of "Tapestry," it also undermines the theme of actions having consequences.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the episode, Captain Picard receives a fatal wound - more precisely, fatal damage to his artificial heart, a prosthetic necessitated by the fact that his original heart was damaged in a bar brawl when Picard was a young Starfleet officer. (Or cadet. Whatever.) The bar brawl was actually a fight with three Nausicaans, large, belligerent aliens who...well, let's just say they had it coming. Picard fought them, got stabbed in the back, his heart was destroyed, he got an artificial one. Decades later, his artificial heart was fatally damaged by an energy discharge.

Picard is given the opportunity to change the past - to avoid the event that led to him needing the artificial heart. (The energy discharge that damaged his artificial heart would not have been lethal to a flesh-and-blood organ.) He takes this path, and then gets to witness his life unmade: that single change leads to a series of different actions, different choices, different directions. Returned to his present time, he is now a subordinate officer who plays a menial role in the functioning of the ship he had once captained, running reports to his superiors. One thread of his life has been pulled, and the tapestry of his life has unwoven.

In the end, he gets a chance to put it all back the way it was before, with a knife through his heart in the past, and a damaged artificial heart in the present - and finds that the surgeons operating on him after the energy discharge were able to save his life. The series continues, with Picard as captain of the Enterprise.

A few months ago (well, eleven months and four days ago, to be exact) a blogfriend was having a crisis of faith, wondering if perhaps academia was not the right path for her, if maybe she should just stop being a scientist at a major research university. More specifically, she was starting to feel a case of Impostor Syndrome. I left a comment for her:

Ooooh. Impostor syndrome. Fight it. That's like doubt to a Mentat. Let it get a hold and next thing you'll know is that you've been working in a factory for seventeen years, and it will suddenly occur to you to wonder why you didn't re-apply to your first choice of grad schools (which wasn't accepting ANY grad students the year you graduated from college) after you washed out of your soulless second choice after one semester.

And as I left that comment, I realized that there was something I might have changed in the past.

I've told this story before - I think. Brief overview: I was in my final year as an undergrad at the University of Scranton, double-majoring in Physics and Philosophy. I had applied and been accepted to several graduate programs, including Bryn Mawr and the University of Delaware. Both of these schools had programs in Non-Linear Dynamics, which was the field I wanted to specialize in. Bryn Mawr was a better fit, much more closely resembling the University of Scranton: small Liberal Arts University with a small Physics program and a fantastic student/teacher ratio. The University of Delaware was a much larger state University with a much larger Physics program and only a single professor specializing in my chosen area.

But Bryn Mawr suddenly stopped taking graduate students for the Fall 1989 semester - after I had been accepted. I knew this before the head of the Physics department did. He only received official confirmation minutes before I was supposed to head down for my first face-to-face meeting.

Suddenly I was heading to my second choice school, the University of Delaware.

Delaware ate me up and spit me out. The experience, as I have said before, was like being mugged while drowning. I felt incompetent in every way possible. I washed out after a single semester.

There's no guarantee this wouldn't have happened at Bryn Mawr, of course.

And what did I do afterwards? Did I jump right on the Internet, check out the current status of the Bryn Mawr grad program, maybe see if they were accepting students for the Spring semester? Drop an e-mail to the head of the department to see if I could get on a waiting list, or an announcement list for when the program was back on track? Try to bounce right back, get on the horse, take this as a blessing in disguise?

No. None of that. Partly because the Internet, and email, and computers as we know them didn't exist back in early 1990, not in a form any of us would find useful. Contact Bryn Mawr? I'd have to go hunting for an address or a phone number, maybe do some digging in the library. Maybe type out a letter on my electric typewriter - on carbon paper, so I could have a copy.

Partly because I had decided, stoically, stupidly, to play the hand I had been dealt. I had no car - back then, Newark, Delaware was a pretty bike-friendly area. I was less than halfway through a one-year lease. There were employers in the area. I decided to find a job (now that I had lost my teaching assistanceship) and try to earn at least enough money to pay the rent and my living expenses for a while.

And partly because, until I wrote that comment, it had never occurred to me that that was exactly what I should have done.

Would it have worked out? Would I have continued along on my life plan, gotten my Ph.D. by age 27? Would I now be writing popular science books for laymen?

I have no idea.

I stayed in Delaware for another year, working at the solar cell manufacturer to which a kindly University of Delaware Physics professor had pointed me. At the end of that year I went back to Rockville - well, Nanticoke.

A few months after I came home my 81-year-old grandmother was felled by a severe, crippling case of sciatica. She needed a round-the-clock nurse to watch over her.

I took that position.

Several months later she was well enough to return to her home. By then I had found a job at a CD manufacturer. The rest, as they say, is history.

So if I had bounced back after Delaware and somehow gotten right into some hypothetically rebooted program at Bryn Mawr in the Spring or Fall of 1990, how would my life after that point have been different?

Well, in most major respects that's unanswerable. There are too many points of divergence to make any statement. But one thing is for sure: I would not have been there when my grandmother needed me. Her life, and my life with respect to her, might have played out completely differently. Would she have spent the rest of her days in a nursing home, rather than first entering one in early 1996? Would she have had a stroke in - when was it, 1992, 1993? Would she have lived beyond 1998, or maybe died before then?

I don't know. Our lives are a tapestry of actions we have taken, decisions we have made, directions we have gone, people we have known, places we have been. Pluck one thread and the whole fabric begins to unravel.


Afterword:

A few weeks ago, I took my mom for an outpatient procedure - the same procedure for which I had taken her the day I believe I accidentally killed the kitten Gretchen by crushing her under an electric-powered recliner/lift chair. The day that we discovered her decomposing body under the chair, I wanted to cut the plug off to stop it from ever being used again. But my mom stopped me, because she knows there may soon come a day when someone actually needs such a chair. But from that day the chair has been unplugged, and I have allowed no one to use it.

Until the day of this recent procedure, when my mom insisted she needed to sit and put up her legs. I assented, but only on the condition that I check under the chair before she put down the leg lift, the mechanism that I think broke Gretchen's neck.

In her post-procedure stupor she didn't entirely adhere to the plan. When my mother tired of sitting in the chair she decided to get out out of it without putting the leg lift down. This required some acrobatics on her part, and could have undone the effects of the procedure she had just undergone. But once out of the chair, she looked under it to see if it was safe to put down the leg lift.

And there was Amber, curled up almost exactly where Gretchen had been. If my mom had lowered the leg lift, Amber might have died as silently and horribly as Gretchen.

So because Gretchen died, Amber lived.

The chair is once again unplugged and off-limits.