Sideways World

Anyone watching Lost this season?
(Worry not, dear reader, this is not a long fan-post, it's just a jumping-off point).

This season the writers have created this third reality that Michelle and I have been calling Sideways World. In their Sideways World, the plane never crashed on the island and the characters get off the plane and go on with their lives as planned... except that there are weird little things that didn't exist at the beginning of the series. One of the characters, for instance, suddenly has a son that didn't exist in the beginning. Confusing, I know, but that's what Lost is best at.

So it got me thinking about my own version of Sideways World and that has turned into this weird fantasy that occupies me at weird times. I start thinking about the people in my life and the people I have lost and I wonder where they would be in Sideways World.

Maybe I would not have met Jeff. Maybe I would never have gone back to school... maybe I would have three kids and my sister would be a doctor.

Maybe I would be living with a very sweet man who would make me laugh and bring me tea when I felt crummy.

Maybe I would be happier.

I have also been reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (read it, seriously, but read Eat, Pray, Love first) and she spends a lot of time talking about the glut of choices that we have in this society and how those choices are a blessing and a curse. For every choice we make there can be dozens of roads not taken, dozens of maybes. These "maybes" have the potential to make us completely insane.

There are some things in my Sideways world Fantasy that I know would be different... mostly small things, really, like my car would be new and I would have a maid and a hot tub... and there is the small matter of that very sweet man... but of the big decisions in my life I don't know what I would change.
Even my big mistakes had a purpose...

But I still find myself sitting in the back yard, listening to the sounds of my neighborhood settling in for the night and I think about how things are going in Sideways World.