Parallel Lives: What if your life had taken a completely different direction?

What if life offered you another path?

If you hadn't made that decision or followed that path that day, everything else wouldn't have happened.

So do we really choose our destiny?

Destiny is a matter of choice, not chance.

"Destiny is the one who shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who play them" quoted William Shakespeare

We are not unaware that the major turning points in our lives often depend on small coincidences.

Parallel Lives

We have an infinite number of paths before us, and perhaps not a single possible right direction.

We have several lives in one life after all.

Not to mention these parallel lives if we had taken a different path than our decision of the moment.

Just one grain in the gears, one different choice, and our lives could have changed completely.

It made me rethink and reflect on all those choices made. And what could have happened if I had made a different choice.

So sometimes I start to ask myself the question "What if?" 

• What if I hadn't had this professional project in the audiovisual sector? This clear path towards a life in Paris to live my dream of evolving there? I think that today I would still be with my sweetheart at the time. Married and mother of his children in the depths of Brittany. This distance that was put in place by different futures and desires, him in Brittany, me in Paris, would not have had to exist. Having moved away little by little by convincing myself that we had no common future. To this day, however, he remains the only man that I have truly loved with all my being. With whom I saw a future. And of whom I am intimately convinced that he truly loved me for who I was, on a daily basis, without frills, without masks, without filters.

• What if I had been able to join this film school whose entrance exam I had passed? This school that made me dream and was reaching out to me in Paris, but which could not happen due to lack of funding. What path would I have taken next in this environment? Would I have met the right person at the right time? As I was lucky enough to do when I started out in Paris on the path I followed (Claire, if you are reading this, you remain my professional guardian angel :-))

• What if Had I been less reserved and lacking in self-confidence growing up? And would I have dared to take drama classes? And would I have thrown myself into the race for auditions later in Paris? And above all, would I have succeeded in becoming an actress today? Another way of evolving in this environment that fascinates me, but this time in front of the camera and not behind it.

• What if I hadn't had this opportunity for professional training to settle in Paris and try my luck? How long would it take me to leave this bread-and-butter job, move out of my mother's house and what kind of life would I have created for myself?

• What if I hadn't had this "affair" with this work colleague? I probably wouldn't have had this feeling of suffocation in my work and in my life. And this need for a change of scenery with this expatriation project in Montreal would surely not have happened. At least not at that time in my life probably. Or not...who knows.

• Or in a lighter way, what would have happened if I had dared to talk to my crush of the moment? Could it have led to a beautiful story? Or not? We will never know.

And yet I sometimes think about it. Especially when I see people who were close when they were younger and who meet again 15 years later by chance, to live a beautiful story. I find the power of destiny crazy.

These couples that didn't work out at the time, because they weren't ready. Life let them have their own experience each on their own. And it's as if, having reached maturity like a good fruit, their life would put them back on the same path, at the right time.

As if it was written all along that they had to end up together.

I may be too romantic, of course. But these forces of destiny have always made me dream.

Which is just as true for friends, by the way.

I met a good friend from high school during my first years in Paris. Life, the college years, made us lose touch. He in Berlin on Erasmus, me in Brittany.

Since we met in Paris, we have never left each other. And today he is a landmark in my life and my best friend.

This is not about dwelling on the past or regretting my choices, no. But just questioning or projecting what my parallel lives could have been.

And you, do you sometimes ask yourself these types of questions?

Parents, what would your life be like without children?

What would your life be like if you hadn't followed this career path?

Or what if you had left everything behind to follow your dream of living on the other side of the world?

If you had followed your passion?