I was thinking the other night that we really don’t always have a chance to understand whether we’ve made the right or even, at times, best decisions in life. We can’t, for one simple reason: once we make the decision, there’s no turning back. That decision has implications and those implications unfold. We can’t see what would have happened if we had made a different decision.
I love science fiction movies in which there are alternate realities. The alternate realities show what would have happened if we had lived a life in which we had made a different decision (The Family Man) or if life had gone on without our influence (Miracle on 34th Street).
But reality dictates that we don’t really have those choices.
We take our best shot, and we see the consequences. Sometimes, those consequences bode in our favor. Other times, they don’t. Either way, however, they are what they are. There is no alternate or parallel reality.
I happened to be thinking tonight about the fact that Mom and Dad, who were bridge players for years past, used to play not only bridge, but they also used to play a game called duplicate bridge. In duplicate bridge, everyone is dealt the same set of cards. The winner isn’t the team who wins. The winner is the team who scores the best over a series of hands. They all have the same set of hands, each and every time. Therefore, what we effectively see, is alternate reality being played out in real time before our very eyes.
Duplicate bridge is competitive in that, at the end of the hand, somebody wins and a whole bunch of other teams lose. But that’s okay. Some win. Others lose and they tend to win or lose relative only to each other. It’s the nature of life. However, more importantly, to a student of life, it is important to determine what really turned out to be the best course under a given set of circumstances.
When I choose to play a particular card at a particular time, and somebody plays a different card under those same circumstances, it is not necessarily a question of who wins or loses, it is a question of who obtained a marginal benefit over the other. In time, and especially because the road has so many turns, it’s only time that will ultimately determine what was the best course.
It is not just a question of whether that one decision was right or wrong, but what would have been the marginal benefit of having made another decision at that particular point in time.
I choose my decisions in life as best as I can. My decisions are circumscribed by who I am, my experiences, my education, and my predispositions. Do I know for sure that those are the best decisions? Of course not. I think they are, or obviously I wouldn’t have made them. But I don’t really know they were the very best decisions I could have made.
If I only had the opportunity to have had a duplicate partner, living and acting someplace in some alternate reality, living my life and making different decisions under a different set of parameters, perhaps the best decision would have been clearer. If only I had the opportunity to see not only that player but others, making different decisions, under similar circumstances. The best decision would be the clearest.
Most of the time, I can narrow my decisions to the first best, second best, and third best, if at all. But I really don’t’ know, especially when it comes down to very fine decisions, which one will be the very best in the long run. If it were only possible that we could ultimately play duplicate life, where each of us makes decisions and gets a chance to see how they play out before we ultimately have to play our cards.
But that’s not reality, is it?
What is reality is that, when all considerations are counted, we’ve got to take our best shot and hope that, when all the chips are counted, ours turned out to be the very best shot those circumstances could muster
And hopefully, when the final score is counted, we end up scoring high enough. We may not score the highest. We hopefully aren’t scoring the lowest. And, at the end of the day, we hopefully will score better than 50%.