Another imagined conversation

Standing on rocks along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

It's a nice night.
Yes.
Do you ever wonder...
Wonder what?
What one choice you made in your life that irreversibly affected everything else after that, and whether you would change it if you could.
Life isn't a "choose your own adventure" book.
I know, I know it's not, but if you could...
I would have picked what was behind door number three.
C'mon, seriously.
I'm stalling, let me think about it for a bit...Let's walk a while.

No.
No what?
There isn't any one thing big enough to qualify.
How can that be possible?
Because too much depends on what other people would have done.
What do you mean?
I mean...look, I could have resisted coming back to Chicago after school. Or been married and divorced two or three times already. I could have chosen to be an architect instead of a teacher, or gone to school in a whole other state. For instance, if I had gone to USC I probably would have drifted up to San Francisco when I was done. And maybe, independent of everything else, I would have met the people I know there now and in turn would know that same group. Or I could have gone to school in St. Louis and stayed and eventually met a different, but still known to me now, group. Or gone to Florida and met L. Undergrad was probably the biggest choice, but I would not change that.
So you think there is a certain amount of the inevitable, no matter what choice you make?
"A certain amount"...yes.
That seems a little depressing.
It's just one way to look at it.
We should have more control over our fate than that.
We believe that we do, and that's why we get out of bed in the morning. I mean, despite what I'm saying, I do believe that we decide our own fate for the most part. But at the same time, I think that we are somehow connected to people in a way that makes it very likely that they will pass through our lives at some point.
So our choices make no difference?
Our choices affect the outcome of those meetings; whether we keep people in our lives or let them go, whether it is a positive or negative thing.
You sure do leave a lot up to fate.
I try not to, but fate always seems to win.