“In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” Famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once spoke these words, and I have often wondered their veracity. How much of character and life are fate, and how much are an aggregation of seemingly random decisions and happenstances? Or is it some form of union between both? 

I quite often think of these questions, even if only beneath the surface of other questions. And what I find so interesting about this topic is that it is one without the possibility of a concrete answer. We do not have the ability to delve into our past to see how our lives would have turned out if a different decision were once made. Our views of the past are limited by what we know our present to be – an alternative future will always remain in the realm of the unknown. 

However, does that truly mean it does not exist? There exists a scientific theory known as multiverse – that there are an indefinite amount of “universes,” where each alternative history of the world exists in a separate reality. Nobel prize winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first proponents of this theory, arguing that the different histories outlined by his equations are not truly substitutes for one another, “but all really happen simultaneously.”  

In this sense – the very notion of reality is questioned. Famed physicist Steven Hawking expands on this idea, noting, “I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is.” He concludes, “Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper.” 

Nonetheless, the true meaning of reality is not the point of “The Intersection.” The point of “The Intersection” is that these different realities are evidently possible based on minor events and decisions of our past. Whether these realities truly exist or not is a different matter, and will likely never be solved in my lifetime. But, the fact that they could exist – this I have little doubt of. 

Personally, I often wonder how my life would have turned out if I had made different decisions in the past – this is the crux of chaos theory’s interest to me. For example – what if my father took a job in Connecticut when I was eight years old (as he very nearly did)? What if I have a unique talent in something that I have never discovered, and how different would my life be today if I had found it? What if I decided to take Econ 101 freshman year instead of psychology – is it possible I would have been a business major instead of political science, leading to a different job, in a different city, with a different life thirty years from now? All these “differents” and especially their unknown consequences are what I find especially interesting about the topic.

One of the best examples to illustrate this concept is the story of how my parents met. On a whim one day, my mother decided to attend a political event that she had little interest in going to. She was convinced by her mother to go, and only relented, because she had nothing else to do that day. She ended up meeting my dad there. What if she decided not to go and stay home instead, or if a friend called that day to meet for lunch – it is possible every moment of her subsequent life would be different from that point forward. It’s amazing to think about – I (like Elizabeth in the story) would not exist. 

This notion represents more implications of chaos theory, I believe, which is why Elizabeth’s section was one of my favorites to write. Perhaps the achievements of some people are partly dependent on the mere circumstances that brought their parents or even grandparents together. Can the accomplishments of Mozart, Einstein, and Lincoln be traced back to an unlikely meeting of their parents, or a near-death survival two or three generations before them? This is another very interesting question to think about.  

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To venture down a different road now, a major difficulty for me throughout this project has been how to represent randomness through the act of writing. The first plan for the project was to actually incorporate “randomness” into the writing process itself. I first experimented with a “random plot generator,” but I quickly learned it was more a silly “Mad Lib” type of system than anything else. 

I then shifted towards using random word generators. You can go to a website, input the type of words and number of words you want, and it will randomly give you those words. So, I planned for one chapter use no randomness, and then for other chapters to use the random word generator with varying degrees (thus increasing the “randomness”). How different would each story end up? Would it be easy for the reader to discern the degrees of randomness involved, and what would be the impact on the quality of the prose, plot, and readability? The idea for this methodology was to discuss chaos theory both explicitly through its principles discussed in the plot itself, and implicitly though implementing randomness into the act of writing. 

One of the issues with chaos theory is its inability to be truly demonstrated in reality (to a person’s life, at least). In the real world, once a change is made to a system, it is impossible to see how that system would have developed if that change were not made. But, maybe, this could be partly remedied by implementing chaos theory into the act of writing fiction. In writing fiction, maybe you can go back and ask, “what if x had happened instead of y?” And, maybe, you will get a far different result.

Nonetheless, as I soon came to learn, randomness and fiction writing simply do not go well together (for me, at least). After having written a scene, I simply could not bring myself as writer to delete some of the words I had written. This was a fairly quick revelation, as I was challenged with removing one of my favorite sentences in the second chapter due to a “random” word that made absolutely no sense in the sentence’s context. This isn’t going to work, I thought. 

But, maybe the act of fiction writing by itself does include at least a little bit of randomization. How does a small decision I make in Chapter 1 – one I barely even think about – affect the entire rest of the story? Take the park, for example. There was not any particular reason I chose for Brian to walk through a park on his way to work that morning – it could have easily been just a sidewalk or busy street. But, the park ends up reappearing throughout the entire story, and becomes a central symbol for the past. The last scene of Chapter 3 is another example. Having him sitting at a bar lonely was simply the first thing that arose in my head, but it could have been anything. I absolutely love the scene now, and cannot imagine anything else in its place, but maybe that initial spark of imagination was, in part, random.  

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In the end, though, the point of the randomization aspect was to give the project more significance. But, for me this novella does have significance. It attempts to represent a vastly complicated scientific and philosophical theory through 7,500 words of creative fiction. Whether I successfully accomplished this task or not, it was not a simple endeavor to undertake. 

An aggregation of these thoughts brings to light my overarching beliefs about determinism and chaos theory. I believe many parts of life are random at the micro level. Where we live, who our friends are, whom we marry – they at times are a result of past events and decisions five, ten, and fifteen years ago. One’s character has the ability to change as a result of this, as elements of character are as much due to experience and surroundings as anything. You can see this idea through the course of Brian Newton’s life, as the people in his life and his character change depending on the events of March 06, 2016. 

However, there are also some parts of life that cannot change, and these are just as interesting as those that can. A person cannot change the physical features they are born with. Sure, someone can get plastic surgery, but a person cannot make himself or herself naturally taller or more athletic. Take a person with Parkinson’s disease, for example. Their lives can go a thousand different ways at first, but, if they have a certain gene, there is nothing they can do to prevent the disease from eventually taking over. It is a sad and devastating certainty, and what some people might call a type of fate. 

For Brian, no matter where his life turns, he is going to die of an abnormal heart condition sometime in his early 60s – this fact is inevitable. And, in a broader sense, death is inevitable for all living beings and even the planet of earth, which is destined to die as the sun gets overwhelmingly hot five or so billion years from now. Life can be both random and determined, depending on which part of life you are discussing. We might always end up at the same destination, but we can change how long it takes to get there, and, more significantly, how we get there.