Ask A Genie: The Big Questions

Greetings, affable reader! How delicious to join you again, and tangle with the questions that confuse us, intrigue us, and weigh upon our minds. Like splinters, unasked questions do swell and fester. Let us fetch our tweezers and dislodge a few.

Dear Genie: I get bogged down, sometimes, wondering how my life might have been different, if I'd made different decisions. How can I stop going in circles, wishing my life had an undo button?
Dizzy in Düsseldorf

Dear Dizzy: The saying is cliché now, about the grass being greener on the other side, which is too bad, because I'm the one who coined that saying. (I used to go to poets' parties quite a lot, which is how one usually coins a saying.) I think the saying makes more sense when you know the story, so here goes: I heard a wish from a man who was envious of his neighbor's lawn. There was no illusion involved; his neighbor's grass really was greener. So the man made his wish, and the neighbor got a strange hankering to buy a farm in the country. I bought the neighbor's house at a bargain, and gave it to the man, who was very happy. He went right out to lay in the grass, enjoying that fresh-mowed fragrance. I let him be for a few months, and then went back to visit him. As I expected, the grass was already getting brown and spotty. The lesson wasn't, as you may have heard, that things seem brighter when you covet them, though I believe that's true. What made the lawn green was the neighbor's bag of fertilizer, which the man could have bought for a penny at Ye Olde Hardware Store, and saved his wish for something else. Point being, the common thread between your present life and some other life you might have lived, is you. In the famous words of Italy tour guide Joe Romano, "if you're sad now, you might still feel sad there."

On the other hand, if you've learned something in the course of your present life, you can use that knowledge now, in your present life, as readily as you could in your alternate universe. If you want to make different decisions, you probably still can. But if it is too late to change your mind, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that you made your decisions for a reason, and the alternate you, who made other decisions, was just as hapless in that life as the real you was in yours.

Dear Genie: I did NOT have THIS in mind when I made my wish, as you DEFINITELY knew. Go to hell!
Deeply Uncomfortable

Dear Deeply: I don't know what to tell you. I gave you a Human Microbiology textbook, didn't I? And you signed a form asserting that you'd read and understood it? I even highlighted the part where it talked about gas production as an essential and unavoidable part of digestion. Different people want different things, even very strange things, and I'm not in a position to judge. But I can't imagine how you thought your wish would go differently. If you now regret your adaptation, I suggest you consult a skilled physician.

Dear Genie: A friend of mine passed away this week, quite suddenly, with half his life ahead of him and a wealth of talent that will go unrealized. How are we supposed to go on? How do we do our life's work, when life is so ready to rip the rug out from under us?
Unsettled Friend

Dear Unsettled: You bring to mind a story, quite a funny one, about an escapade in which I did have a rug ripped out from under me, but I suppose that's not apt for the present question. Remind me to tell it, another time.

Friend, I feel for you. The uncertain timing of a certain end, for ourselves as well as our loved ones, is the among the most agonizing, unfair propositions people face. Yet, perhaps we might examine the opposite situation. Imagine we knew our expiration dates ahead of time, that each of us was given a calendar, marked on a certain day with a silver stamp. Imagine yours, safely at the bottom of a nice tall stack of other calendars, one for each year in your future. Would the comfort of that certainty propel you to finish your metaphorical concertos? Let me suggest that it would not.

I have given a handful of people precisely such a stack of calendars, to those people's express wish and great relief. They all told me how they meant to use the time: planting orchards, writing novels, giving their children extra kisses on the forehead. Not one of them actually did it. They lived their lives at ease, and why wouldn't they? They told jokes and drank wine, made notes in their journals about the meaningful work they'd start tomorrow. They wrinkled their brows each December, taking another calendar off the pile, but they treated each year as they had the last, until they had seven calendars left. What it is about seven, I don't know, but that's the magic number. With seven calendars left, they went from ease to anxiety. Was there time, in seven years, to do a life's work? They aimed to try, but the pressure was immense. From then on, they were haunted by the certainty they'd once wished for. They all spent their last days wringing their hands over misspent calendars, long since tossed aside.

Grief I will grant you. I'm sorry for your loss. Would that I could give your friend the long life he deserved. As to your allotment of time, don't squander your uncertainty. Use your days. When certainty arrives, you'll be glad you did.