The fate of fig trees

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

I just quit an office job. Some days I really loved this job. The people I worked with were smart and amazing. The work was challenging to say the least. But at the end of a long day at work, I wanted to go play with other people's babies. Something in me felt I was ignoring the universe hinting at me, and that sometimes those hints were pretty much more like the universe screaming in my face and me still missing it somehow. I hate making choices when they are big and life changing like this. Like which amazing nanny job out of the three offered was right to take? I don't know if I will think next week about the figs I did not pick, but in the moment, I have what my friend Stacey calls "analysis paralysis:" too many amazing choices. Best to just stand still. I have often thought that when the scientists developed the "flight or fight" theory they forgot about possums, deer and me; we don't fight or flight, we freeze. Inevitably though, one action or decision leads to the necessity of forward motion through another action and decision, like the game Mouse Trap, on a big lifelong time line scale.

I just finished reading the amazing His Dark Material trilogy by Philip Pullman (I heard the movie sucks) and in it, there is a lot of talk about decisions and parallel universes where different decisions you could make in one instance branch into alternate realities.  It has me thinking of moments in my life where I was obviously at a road sign with arrows pointing in all different directions: that day at bumbershoot when I first verbalized that I didn't believe in god anymore. Or getting drunk as shit and kissing kevin on new years. Or telling a relative stranger in a CVS parking lot that I knew I was going to marry him - and two years later, marrying him. Deciding to move to Texas. Some of the splits in the road are so obvious, but others are just tiny tiny tiny. These are highlighted when you run into somebody unexpectedly at the grocery store that had you gone later or earlier, you would not have run into them, and maybe nothing happens and it feels like nothing was different in your day, nothing was shifted, but I like to think that somehow, something has changed because that moment occurred. Chaos theory. Butterfly wings are always flapping.

I like to imagine deja vu occurs when the universe wants to tell you that your path is the right one. On the plane to Seattle to celebrate my Grandmother's 80th birthday I imagine the turbulence in the air as tiny pockets and holes the wing tips are hitting that are windows into other worlds.

This year was dubbed The Year or No Mistakes. My husband and I are trying to live up to that. It does not mean that we have to be perfect, it means we embrace our decisions and move forward in them confidently without looking back, double guessing, or over-rationalizing ourselves out of things we want to do. So. Onward and Upward. Eat the fig and don't worry about all the others. Start grabbing them up.