Dear future hubster,
today I am going to be one of those people I usually find annoying, saying great things about somebody who's just died, not having mentioned them or their work's impact on my life in the recent or not so recent past. And maybe I am also one of those cliché girls, swearing on a book that changed their lives.
Many books have changed my life though. Today's story is about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, of which I own multiple copies in at least two languages - I thought I'd read it in 3 but I'm not so sure anymore.
I also distributed many more during the years to people as a sort of parting gift - if you ever meet somebody who received one from me, please tell them that it means that there was a time when I felt so close to them that I wanted to let them in on a revelation; that I wanted to share with them something I thought I'd understood about life.
That revelation, understanding, interpretation, simplified to a motivational poster length because I haven't read enough Nietzsche to be more elaborate, is that there is no control group. Any decision we make is going to be the first and only of its kind, and there is no way of knowing how other decisions would have played out. The "other option" isn't actually real.
For somebody like me, often worried to extremes about getting things wrong, this - not being able to compare possible outcomes - is unsettling. Sometimes dowright scary. I am just learning to see it as beautiful too, liberating, for the absence of the right choice also makes The Right Choice non-existent.
Ironically, I've been wanting to be The Right Choice for so many so often - and when I wasn't, when they made a choice that didn't include me, or couldn't make one that did because they were held down by their own what ifs, scared to choose me for fear of having to un-choose everything and everybody else, scared of throwing away the other option that might be better, well, then I gifted them a copy of this book, thinking that seeing the brutal beauty of this lack of second drafts and revisions, control groups, comparable other options, will change their lives too.
