The Life You Never Lived

Flashback. Try to remember a seemingly un-important moment which actually turned out to be pivotal. Perhaps you turned left instead of right? spoke to one person rather than another?Reflect on the chain of events that lead to a relationship, or that job, or that new perspective. Now try and imagine if you hadn't turned left, or spoken to that person. Your timeline would have changed; your life altered unimaginably. Bizarre thought, isn't it? Now let's roll the dice again. Imagine a painful memory, an event which changed you, defined you, warping everything forever. Perhaps it was the death of a loved one, or the end of a relationship, or the moment when someone you adored said sorry, but no. What if those things hadn't happened? What if the person had lived? or that relationship survived? Or that person you adored had leant forward to kiss you gently on the lips? Now here's the really odd thing; our lives have been a series of happenstances, a continuum of seemingly unimportant incidents which when combined defined you. We've been influenced by people we'll never meet, who for whatever reasons turned left instead of right, or got on that bus, or answered that call. Perhaps the tiny decisions taken by others have caused a ripple effect that has made a massive impact on the life we have lived or had hoped for? Perhaps somewhere out there, out in the great unknown, somebody or something had changed our world in ways that we will never truly grasp.