LIFE EVERLASTING

Stephen Hawking, 

theoretical physicist and cosmologist, 

died on March 14th, 2018.

WHAT IF? 

      What would have happened

            If I had turned left, 

instead of right, 

   If I had run,

    instead of walked, 

         If I had said no,

instead of yes,

                         If I had never been born,

Would the world exist?

Over coffee at Timmy’s George was metioning that he had a dream the other night. In it he was hurrying to catch a plane. He wasn’t in a terminal running to the boarding gate, no, it was about his acquiring an illusive ticket. It was one of the nightmarish dreams that he experiences from time to time, a dream where he finds himself searching for his car, or is lost on streets that seem to go nowhere. The dreams always end with his surrendering to the fact that he’s never going to get to where it is he wants to go, and he wakes up. He went on to say that the dreams themselves were not important, it was the fact that the characters that he meets in his dreams are known to him, which is fine, but they’re, most always, deceased persons, and it’s the fact that he engages in conversation, sensible, meaningful, conversations with these people that’s troubling. It’s as if he's a part of the dream, actually exist in that time frame, and is always searching for something illusive that is just beyond his reach. As he was looking a bit down, and as he was obviously concerned about the meaning behind his dreams, I told him about a program that I’d watched on BBC television station where a cosmologist had discussed the multiverse, a cosmos in which there are multiple universes. And by multiple, they mean an infinite number. These uncountable realms sit side by side in higher dimensions that our senses are incapable of perceiving directly. George, who’s not up on these things, looked even more concerned. I explained that our dreams might be a portal into a multiverse, parallel worlds, where we carry on, and live an infinite number of lives. I tried to explain that  everytime that we make a decision, say to go left instead of right, we split into two, and the result is a parallel universe where both lives play out in real life, experiencing what might have happened had we turned right. In doing so, over the course of a lifetime having made many decisions of this nature, we exist in an infinite number of universes. Of course, we’re only conscious of one universe, and although we might die in one of these universes, our counterparts continue to exist. Life everlasting? George looked at me with a blank expression, drank the last of his coffee, and without saying goodbye, got up, and went home. I watched through the coffee shop window as he walked down the street. I couldn’t help but notice that at the end of the street George paused, and rather than turn right as he normally would have, he turned left and took the long way home.

Drake Wood Ducks   Watercolour Painting