What Might Be or Could Have Been I'll Never Know

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The other day someone mentioned valerian root. I thought, Valerian root? That sounds so familiar. How do I know this?

Then I remembered. Ah, yes. My Yale interview. That terrifying event of my youth required as many calming OTC concoctions as I could get my hands on. At the time, I administered the daily pill in hopes I’d show up to my graduate school admissions interview calmer than the freak-out nervous scaredy-cat I was.

Those were the days, the mid-1990s. I’d applied to graduate schools in the eastern US because my undergrad was done in California and I wanted to move closer to my family back East. I applied to the best MFA programs in the region that I could find on a list in a book — that’s how we learned things back then. Of the schools I applied to, two responded with invitations to come to an in-person interview: Hunter College in NYC and Yale in New Haven, CT.

I would un-staple some paintings from their frames, roll them up and pack them, and fly across the country to prove my worthiness as a candidate for admission.

The Hunter interview I worried about not one bit. The Yale interview got my typical anxious nervous system in a tizzy for weeks leading up — because, Yale. Thus, the valerian root.

I’ve thought about that crossroad moment in my life over the years. I ended up on a short list of three alternates for Yale, though I never made it off the list. I got accepted into Hunter, where I eventually got my degree.

How different would my life have been if I’d been accepted to Yale? I was very close to going down that life path. There is no doubt in my mind I’d have accepted the admission. There is no doubt I’d have graduated with a lot of debt to my name and swiftly gone into a job — any job — as soon as I could find one.

When I moved to NYC to attend Hunter, my future husband moved with me because he’d gotten a job with Cantor Fitzgerald at the top of the World Trade Center. This paid well enough that we could pay off the smallish debt I incurred from Hunter and save some money to buy the house in Virginia that we still live in.

If I had gone to Yale, but my boyfriend moved to NYC, would we have survived the long distance? There weren’t cell phones back then, and no Zoom calls. We’d both have been busy. How often would we have seen each other?

In hindsight, to see these two paths so different in front of me — it’s hard to imagine what life would have been if I’d chosen the other path. I might not have married my boyfriend. If we did marry, we likely wouldn’t have had our sons when we did. My sons would never be. All because of one college acceptance.

Who’s to know? I’ll never know. But it doesn’t take much to understand that each turn down the next path leads us toward one life and away from countless others. The more paths we take and decisions we make, and the more time that passes, the more we understand this. Ahh, the benefits of age.

I’ve had conversations with people who grapple with decision-making. Some brains struggle to make sense of so many choices. Other brains struggle with accepting the inherent lack of guarantee that there is a “best” choice. It takes time and trust to gain fluency in listening to the gut. I don’t mean the impulse in us. I mean the intuitive, below-consciousness workings of the mind.

Imagine a vast, microscopic figuring-out machine that calculates far faster than one second and announces its findings via subtle bodily sensations. This isn’t impulse. This is a highly sensitive tool in us that enables us to act and think wisely in a complicated world.

This doesn’t mean the slower, lumbering tool of assessing cost-benefit for our decisions isn’t useful, too, but the two working as a team can lead us down paths that we might be glad we traveled one day.

That old rascal Chance will come in no matter what we intuit or assess, although chance is a numbers game, too. If I never drive recklessly, my chances of getting into an accident are less. If I go on instinct and well-considered assessment, my chances of moving down a hopeful path increase. If I learn things, that’s more helpful than not. If I put myself out there, I’ll meet others who might very well provide some cool options one day.

Chance, instinct, assessment, action, moving forward — these are the dancers in the choreography of life.

The story of chance and choice continued for my husband and me. After I graduated, I started a career in the arts with some exciting events, but then I finally got pregnant with our first son, and from there I was hooked into the best part of my life — motherhood. By chance, my husband’s good friend decided to leave Cantor. My husband decided that he’d look elsewhere, too.

We moved to Virginia where he’d later be laid off during the dot com bust, and it was back up to Cantor he went to start on a consulting gig that would allow him to commute during the week while the kids and I stayed in VA. My husband didn’t love this idea, but we needed the money.

The Friday before 9/11, our friend called my husband and asked if he’d like to take another job back in VA, and he was delighted. Back to Virginia, he went. The following Tuesday he watched the friends and colleagues he’d worked with just days before, crash to the ground in real-time on the TV in our family room. I won’t describe his reaction. It is seared in my mind forever.

That was chance.

But so were my two sons’ hires at their first job out of college not long ago. They got hired by the same smallish company which soon got acquired by a larger company that gave them some fortunate benefits. This was a combination of hard work during college, using their network to get the interview for hire, working hard in their positions, and then pure chance that their smallish company got acquired.

Chance goes both ways — lucky and unlucky. Action, assessment, and gut instinct generally go one way — forward.

My life could have been endless different lives. Yours, too. Math can be the life of the party or it can be an odd bird sitting off to the side trying to explain to you that life is a faceless mirage. But math will do what it will, and in the meantime, I’ll wake up tomorrow, follow my gut, think on the choices in front of me — but not too much — and carry on.

We’ll see what happens next. Whatever it is, for today, I’m hopeful.

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Hope you're well, friends.