Tomorrow I am off to meet other Korean adoptees, mostly Swedes but also from other parts of the world, and to listen to a bunch of them talking about, well... us. I asked myself "why", just before, and I'm not sure. I think, because I want to determine just how big a part of me this really is.
But as to "how big parts of us things are" it's a little arbitrary, wouldn't you say? Would I be this hopeless unmotivated game geek with author dreams if there had been nothing wrong with my leg? Or would I be a world famous dancer and model with posters in half the male population's bedrooms? Could anyone say that the two are the same person? And would my leg problem be the "defining" in my life, if we knew for a fact that the other path would have happen had it not been? Since there's so many other "defining" moments. Had I not gone to school away from home at 16 I might not have failed and lost confidence, but I might also have withered into a voiceless mouse in a corner without the support and inspiration of the people I met there. Or, everything might have gone exactly the same. So who can say which choices actually made a difference in our lives, and which don't. Maybe the big choices don't really matter, and some random small ones end up dictating our lives.
Well, the choice to go to this seminar will probably not lead to any life-defining changes. Unless I meet the most violently handsome Korean guy with whom I elope and raise sixteen babies, or a giant robot decide to invade Stockholm just tomorrow and beam me up into space. While those two would certainly be fun, it's the tiny little realistic "what-if"s that really scare/excite me. Like, what if I meet someone who is actually a younger sibling of mine, adopted away as I was, and we would possibly never know.
You know, thinking about that, any younger adopted Korean could be a sibling. Okay, so if that violently handsome Korean guy is not older than me, then I'll say goodbye and thanks for the fish. Do not want to go near that possibility, especially with a prospect of sixteen babies.
Livets kalejdoskop
1 year ago
1 comment:
I think actually that one song by Bo Kaspers Orkester sums up "what ifs" very neatly:
"Vi kunde varit nån annanstans
Vi kunde gå åt var sitt håll
Då skulle månen ha en annan glans
Och sången ha en annat innehåll"
...or something to that effect anyway. The rest of the song is much more blunt, but I think those four lines convey a good answer to the question "what if": Things would be different, and somehow that's sort of... sad. Or maybe not sad. I dunno what the word is, but I get one of those inexplicable unnameable poetry-feelings from it.
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