Spectres

I have an interest, as some might have noticed, in a few esoteric subjects, one of which is the 'many worlds' version of quantum physics. I've mainly used the concept in fiction (Oneiros and Lucent spring to mind), but I think it's interesting to think about the idea in relation to my real life. Even if the parallel universes posited by the theory don't have any 'real', objective existence, there are spectral alternative universes where I could have been the same person, but in a radically different situation, according to either decisions or chance occurrences that have befallen me along the way. For example, and probably the way in which my life could have been most different, was if I'd carried on along the educational trajectory that seemed to be possible at one point. When I was 10 and 11, I took a series of exams known as the 'Kent Test', which had replaced the 11-plus as the means whereby children were selected for either grammar school or secondary modern as their next step from primary school. My mark in those tests was 136+/137 - 99.5%, give or take - and within the top ten candidates in the whole county. Academically, I could pretty much have done anything, and I was being touted - indeed had been touted from when I was 7 or 8 - as an Oxbridge candidate. I duly went off to grammar school, and it was a good school, a fact that I appreciated even when I was there - this isn't a case of 20/20 hindsight - but, unfortunately, I was around in an era where the concept of 'gifted and talented' pupils hadn't come to fruition, and I was doing the same work as everyone else. It was, and I'm aware this is probably going to sound impossibly conceited, a waste of my time - it was too easy, and I quickly came to realise that I could achieve superb exam results, which was the only criterion that mattered at that time, with no effort at all. In other words, I didn't have to work, so I didn't. Once I'd got into that mindset, it proved to be virtually impossible to get out of. I did the absolute minimum of work I could get away with all the time, became unpopular with numerous teachers - I remember one particular school report, in a subject I had no interest in at the time and did nothing for throughout a whole school year, which ended with my getting the second or third highest year end exam mark, where the teacher concerned wrote 'This boy does not deserve this exam result', and he was probably right. I did briefly flirt with a university education - nowhere near Oxford or Cambridge, either geographically or academically - hated it, and left to follow the career that I'm still following now. I just wonder if I'd made different decisions, or had been given more encouragement, or hadn't been so downright lazy, where I might have been now. Maybe some version of 'convergent evolution' might have brought me to exactly the same place, but I somehow doubt it. There's no point in regrets, because I am who and where I am, and I know I need to make the best of that situation, but I can't help wondering, who that spectral 'me' could have been.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B