Schrödinger's wallet

One of the persistent thoughts I had as a child was that reality did not exist but was merely conjured up either by my brain — which I found distasteful and egocentric — or that I might just be part of someone else’s dream, which was even more problematic because the person dreaming might suddenly wake up and my life would simply vanish.

I eventually grew out of this and evolved into a materialist, albeit one who still believes in magical realism. Extraordinary things happen in the here and now, not elsewhere. But by my late teens I had developed another fantasy: that I could somehow slip from one timeline or universe into another. Once I even felt I experienced this. I was about to kiss a girl I was certain wanted to be kissed and the next thing I remember was her telling me not to stare at her. Heaven had been so close that it simply slipped away. Hardly the best example to prove the theory. I later experienced a similar sensation when I actually did kiss someone some months later.

In truth, the thought itself is pointless and can even become dangerous, because it can legitimise wrong choices by imagining they might have been the right ones in another realm. Still, sometimes the feeling of existing between worlds is intoxicatingly real, especially when it feels like being sucked into the void.  I still find the theme fascinating and am currently re-reading Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart.  I love this quote from that book: “We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”

A few hours after writing this,  a curve ball was thrown at me by the universe.  Just before sleeping, I realised I might have left my wallet — with all my cards inside — at the office, but I could not be 100 per cent sure. This triggered my anxiety.  I had a panic attack because I had to wait until morning to know. It felt like a Schrödinger’s cat scenario: the wallet was both lost and safely on my desk until reality revealed itself.

What made it worse was that I had a radio show to face before I could even go to the office to check. I tried distracting myself, but my fallback  was another loop. Eventually, I stopped trying to solve the uncertainty and reminded myself instead of the good things already present in my life. I slept soundly.

I woke up at six without any hint of doubt that the wallet was 'alive', had a joyful breakfast with my son, enjoyed the radio programme, and later discovered the wallet sitting safely on my desk.

Maybe that is the answer to these loops. Reality is anchored less by certainty than by the small rituals and people that pull us back into the world. And the magical part is that uncertainty and failures are just part of living — not departures from it.  As Bob Dylan wrote "there is no success like failure and failure is no success at all."