“Non ci resta che piangere” (Nothing left to do but cry) is a 1980’s popular Italian comic movie where actors Massimo Troisi and Roberto Benigni play a janitor (Mario) and a schoolteacher (Saverio) who, due to mysterious circumstances, find themselves transported back in time to the year 1492. Stranded in a small village, they realize they’re unable to return to their own time and, resigned to this course of events, must find a way to make the most out of their new reality.
And so they decide they’re going to use their knowledge of the future to influence events and try to change history. In particular, as Saverio is worried about his sister Gabriella, who fell into depression following a breakup with her American boyfriend, they travel to Spain to try and stop Christopher Columbus from sailing to what he thought were the Indies and discovering America. Without America, there won’t be any American boyfriend, and Gabriella won’t have to go through a painful breakup and a depression. But in trying to reach Spain they find themselves in a number of setbacks and difficulties and when they finally get there, Columbus’ three caravels have already left, leaving the course of history unchanged.
Do you ever think about alternative, unlived lives? The ones you would have or could have or even should have lived if, at that turning point, you took a left instead of a right? If you had the nerve to stay a little longer at a job you found particularly taxing, or quit sooner one that dragged on exasperating you for too long? If you had the patience to work a little harder on a relationship instead of leaving abruptly, or the courage to leave sooner one that ended up being too deleterious? If you had moved to that country instead of living in this one?
Our lives are a collection of pivotal moments, and it's difficult not to become captivated by them, not to ruminate on what we would have been. These moments illuminate our lives from different angles and create narratives and stories that evoke a sense of vulnerability and highlight the complexities of our circumstances. And this process has nothing to do with how pleasing or miserable or just plain regular our existences turned out to be: curiosity, the allure of the unknown, a desire to challenge ourselves, and the obsession of continuous life optimization are all critical factors powering the scenario analysis that we endlessly subject our minds to.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz says that we are born with the capacity to live “a thousand kinds of life” but ultimately end up living only one due to the cultural norms and values that we are socialized into. As singular humans, each of us has several unlived lives that could have been equally possible, and the one we live is the result of the choices we make, the events we get influenced by, and the constraints that Society imposes on us. I’ve read this in an interesting and beautiful New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman titled “What if you could do it all over?”, but I find this idea very intuitive. It is indeed intuitive that the life we ultimately end up living is shaped by our choices and a myriad of environmental factors, and that it could have gone in a thousand different directions. How else could it be?
Is it good or bad for us to do all this what-if kind of thinking? Rothman says that “for some people, imagining unlived lives is torture, even a gateway to crisis”, but “most of us aren’t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been”. Again, kind of obvious, expected stuff. But regardless of the degree of pain and torture, it all boils down to our inability to just accept the way things are. And here’s where the article gets super interesting: Rothman mentions the philosopher Charles Taylor, who has a theory of why that is. He thinks that, at some point toward the end of the eighteenth century, two big trends in our self-understanding converged: (a) we learned to think of ourselves as “deep” individuals, with hidden sources of feelings and talent that we owed it to ourselves to find, and (b) we came to see ourselves objectively, as somewhat interchangeable members of the same species and of a competitive mass society. So, as subjectivity (trend ‘a’) and objectivity (trend ‘b’) both grew more intense, we came to feel that our lives, pictured from the outside, failed to reflect the vibrancy within. In other words, the narrative goes, if somewhere deep inside I have the talents, and I’m human exactly like everybody else, I could have easily lived Mick Jagger’s life; that's why, at this thought, mine kind of sucks.
Sometimes I like to do some what-if thinking. I’m not obsessed over it, but I find its imagination-stretching power energizing. I’m just drawn to possibility itself, as Rothman writes. And my mind goes back to all the times I could have used different words or behaved differently or adopted a different demeanor. Back to all the times I could have been less afraid of the unknown and taken more risks. Or when I could have been more cautious and not have dived into things head first so quickly. To all the times I could have been more patient with my kids, and more present, and more participative and interested in and enthusiastic about their things. Or could have been less self-centered and more available and more dependable. And all the times I could have found the courage to ask for help, instead of showing so much stubbornness. So much useless, senseless, idiotic stubbornness. Maybe, I could have been honest with myself in admitting that my job was something I couldn’t care less about. If only had I been faster in realizing that, instead of letting so many years go by. And what if I’d never left my hometown, or Milano, or Italy? Would I be the same person? Based on Geertz’s findings, I probably wouldn't.
When I learned that I had been admitted to my top-choice university, I was in the bathroom. Mom knocked on the door and said that Stefano’s dad had just called with the news: we had both gotten in. She couldn’t wait and broke it to me right there, from behind the door. Stefano and I were high school classmates, and when we both decided to apply and go take the admission test alongside thousands of others from all over, I thought my odds weren’t great. I was a good student, not exceptional. Plus, that very year they decided to limit enrollment and introduce the admission test, an anomaly for Italian universities. But the day of the test a bird shit on my head, and I took that as a good sign1. I’ve never been superstitious; well, not seriously. But right then I decided to find comfort in believing that the universe was sending me good fortune. So I got in and moved to Milan, and that was a turning point in my life -- I’ve made friends with people I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and many of them went on to get their masters in the U.S., and I thought of doing the same so I applied and got into an Ivy League school and moved there, and met more people that I couldn’t have met anywhere else and got a job on Wall Street, and moved in with a woman that I was supposed to marry but I didn’t, and got homesick and moved back to Europe where I met another woman whom I did marry and made two children with and they’ve been the joy of my life. Had I not received that knock on the bathroom door and not gotten into that college, I probably wouldn’t have moved to Milan and met those people and moved to the U.S. and back to Europe and had my two kids. And that unlived life would have certainly given me other experiences and people and things and maybe I wouldn’t have made many mistakes.
Would my life have been better? Would the life of those close to me have been better? Who knows. But then I think that maybe, if I had had a different life, my kids wouldn’t exist, or I’d have grown up in a different family, and at the mere thought of that I stop the exercise and start appreciating what I have and how I got here. With all the blemishes and imperfections.
Maybe making up stories in our head about unlived lives, focusing on the negative space in our portrait, helps us accept who we are. “Often, these stories serve a didactic purpose; they provoke thoughts that bind us to our lives”, writes Rothman. “As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately.”
In “Non ci resta che piangere”, as Saverio and Mario struggle to adapt to their new surroundings and find a way back to the present day, they learn valuable lessons about life, friendship, the complexities of human nature, and the importance of living in the moment. They learn the irreversibility of history and that, maybe, things just have to be the way they are. That even if, by magic or divine intervention, we were given the possibility to go back in time, we probably couldn’t -- or wouldn’t -- change much.
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This may sound like a joke, but in Italy superstition is kind of big. A ladybug means good luck. A black cat crossing the street means bad luck and you shouldn’t cross that same street right afterwards (just let someone else do it first and then you’re good to go). And shit is apparently a recurring factor. Bird shit on your head or on your car or your bike means good luck. Stepping on dog shit does too.
I think about this all the time and I guess I am just blessed because every time I think about having lived another life for more than a few minutes, I literally panic that I would screw something up and not meet my wife.
Reading your piece prompted me to reflect on why I overanalyze the decisions I've made. I often feel frustrated by this rumination, but as you beautiful said, the negative space is a part of our portrait. We can find beauty and meaning in the coulda / woulda / shouldas of life.