Dear reader,
Come here, get next to the fire :).
A boy squats over the tide. In the reflection of water he sees himself, and his reflection sees him. The boy stirs the sand with his finger, and the reflection does the same. Then something extraordinary happens. The boy watches his reflection get up from where it is sitting and wanders to the other side of the shore. There it builds a sand castle. Not a castle we would expect from a little boy; it has intricate towers, a drawbridge, a moat, several layers of wall and a throne. The boy still squatting, stops and watches in awe. He watches long after the night falls; after his parents call him back; after the very tides in the reflection wash the castle away; after the boy in the sea is gone.
This came to me while reading about the multi-verse theory, or parallel universes. These are realities that mirror our own with some similarity but have significant changes in variables.
Our boy is stirring sand with his finger, the boy in the parallel universe is building a castle. Both boys are identical, but what makes them different is the choice they made. The boy in the reflection was born from choice. With every decision, infinite realities are created. One universe where the boy sat down, the other where he decided to build a castle, one universe perhaps where he never went to the beach to begin with, and so on and so forth.
This idea came to me while procrastinating. Hah! Of all places :). If we pre-suppose that all of us have another version of ourselves somewhere in the universe, doing the opposite of what we are doing, surely then we are better to be competing with them, rather than other people? This is a more healthy and encouraging form of competition.
I see this as the most motivating thing for me this year, and I hope you can see some light in it too. :) It's a lot better advice than just "Work harder, do better next year". It takes a little imagination, but when you start to think of all of the choices we make in our lives, and that the accumulation of those decisions govern where we are today- it makes me wonder. What is the other boy in the reflection capable of? I imagine that the boy couldn't believe his eyes when his reflection sculpted this castle!
