What if...

I went to Rochester, in Kent today. I was with my brother and the kids, and we were going to pick up a car that he’d bid for on eBay. It was a Fiat Coupé 2.0 Turbo (I’ve owned one myself, and they’re like bullets) and he’d foolishly left a £200 deposit on it and then found it wasn’t in the condition that he’d been led to assume by the listing description. Suffice it to say that there was almost a fight in the street (I even took off my sunglasses in readiness) and on the way home Dan said to me “What if…” because I’d talked him out of buying the car he originally wanted.

Anyway, I started thinking, and concluded that our lives are shaped by the choices we make, almost unthinkingly, but that have so many repercussions for us afterwards. I mean, what if…

I hadn’t checked the strange mobile I found that night in my ex-wife’s jacket pocket – just to see if there were any messages on it. And yes, there were messages – they just weren’t the kind of messages I wanted to hear…

Or I hadn’t written a silly little note to Bea when I was on holiday with the kids, because she’d stroked my face when she was talking to me at the bar one night. I thought I was acting like an idiot even as I sealed the envelope and wrote her name across the front…

Or I hadn’t been such a fool during my first marriage, because my behaviour didn’t give the relationship much chance of survival. I doubt we’d have stayed together, but what twists and turns would our lives had taken…

I could go on. So many instances where choices were made without any inkling of the consequent impact. We try to plan ahead, but the truth is that none of us can… not really. And maybe that’s what makes everything that happens to us along the way manageable, somehow… because we don’t know what’s around the corner. Good or bad, things never stay the same for long.

I sometimes think that the choices we make go some way to defining who we are. Not because of what we did at the time, but because of what we learnt by doing it. And as someone or other said once, “To err is human, to forgive Divine". Or something along those lines.