The idea is fun. Except when you are unexpectedly visited by an alternate reality. This happened to me, driving through Ithaca, New York, last August en route to a summer tai chi camp. Ithaca is home to Cornell University, high above Lake Cayuga. Funky old cottages cling to the hillsides like goats. Dreadlocked hippies carrying babies of every ethnic heritage wander in and out of shops named Hemp Unlimited or It Takes a Village. Perhaps the quirk of geography that produces a microclimate of hippies also acts as receiver of alternate time lines. Maybe it bends them the way mountains bend radio waves.
Whatever, I suddenly saw my alternate life. I thought, “I was supposed to go to Cornell. I would have studied animal behavior. I’d be a professor, teaching evolutionary biology. I’d have an Asian wife and several well-behaved kids. I wouldn’t be assailed by doubts, adrift and useless. The university would give my life structure and variety, and during summers I would go to exotic locales for fieldwork.”
I was heartbroken over my loss. Alternate Ithaca Tom had a much better life. He was certain in his work. Society affirmed his choices. I wished I had that kind of protective structure, an exoskeleton to hold in the anomalous movements of my soul that even at that moment propelled me away toward tai chi. Here were the buildings where I attended classes. Here was the gorge I used to explore by night in altered states. Here were young women who looked like the wife I’d met as an undergrad. Alas, the time lines had diverged. I’d gotten off life’s train at the wrong stop.
At camp, Ithaca Tom haunted me. I liked the communal meals and activities. You don’t have to figure out what you’re supposed to do at a camp. You do whatever is on the schedule. I laughed a lot at camp, made jokes. Which is probably why our teacher, Maggie, having scheduled an hour of meditation before breakfast, picked me to wander the halls at 6:20 a.m. singing wake-up songs. Given the choice of being annoyed at some jerk singing outside my door at dawn, or actually doing the singing, I much preferred to be the jerk.
But not even singing at sunrise could banish Ithaca Tom. I talked with a woman in her 50s who was awaiting grandkids, and thought, “I should be awaiting grandkids!” I talked to a guy about my age who studied tai chi when he was younger and is now married with children and working as a sales rep for Dell. And I thought “Damn it! I should have studied tai chi in my 20s, have kids and be a sales rep at Dell.” I have never, ever wanted to be a sales rep, but I listened to these accounts of happy families and meaningful careers with the same cringe I feel when I first hear about a newly ex-girlfriend going out with some one else.
My week at camp passed. Maggie gave me a tape of Pema Chodron reading her book “When Things Fall Apart.” “You should listen to this,” she said. I slipped it into the tape player as I drove home through the green swells of the Catskills, the sun shining over my shoulder. Sometimes you are primed to hear the truth, and this is what it said: give up. Everything will not work out. That’s life.
Of course, Chodron said it better. But the tape performed an exorcism. By the time I arrived home, Ithaca Tom had changed from a hungry ghost to an interesting anecdote, which I told our family astrologer. Now, you might lose confidence in a psychic who made an appointment for September 11. But so it was. “Ah,” he said, when I was done with my tale. “You just encountered a basic life choice. You decided to be the Piscean, the artist, rather than the professor.” Just as well, he went on, because with Saturn in my midheaven I would have been a most unhappy academic. “You would have had a very successful career,” explained my star guy. “But your wife would have had an affair with your best friend.”
Poor Alternate Ithaca Tom. He’s just heard that his wife is moving in with his dearest friend, his research partner. He can’t bear to go home; his bed is cold and his children are gone. He can’t bear to go to the labs; they remind him of his betrayer. He can’t focus on teaching; his work is suffering and he’s coming up for tenure. His life is falling apart. In the midst of his turmoil, he’s visited by an image, a fantasy, an alternate time line. He’s driving in a Volkswagen van to some camp. A tai chi camp. He’s not working. He’s single, footloose, fancy-free. The image pierces his heart. It haunts him like a hungry ghost. He doesn’t realize that it’s no better to be me than it is to be him.
