Before you were born, you were a Schrodinger's Box in the womb.
Before you were born you could have been anything. You could have been a boy or a girl or something in between. You could have been Asian or Caucasian or an implanted alien fetus. You could have been black haired or blond haired, blue eyed or black eyed, ten-fingered or eleven-fingered or twelve. You could have been strong and fit, or weak and malnourished, or dead.
And even after you were born, and deemed alive, and your parents or doctor or nurses or whomever discovered you had noted the color of your hair, and the shape of your face, and the number of your digits, and the shade of your skin - even then, even then a million million other possibilities remained to you.
You could have grown up to be a doctor, who goes on to treat a thousand patients, or kills a patient on the operating table and has your medical license suspended only to retire to a house in Adelaide or Puerto Rico or Miami, or goes to work at the hospital day after day steadily becoming more bitter and more cynical about your job and blowing your brains out when you come home one evening. You might have become a comedian, a wildly popular one with a hit show and ratings through the roof but secretly you hate your jokes or your audience or yourself, or one who's struggling with your career and starving and trying to meet your rent and you smile and laugh through it all but secretly you hate your jokes or your audience or yourself. You could be the next president of America or a small floundering company or a banana republic or the world, who takes over the country or a meaningless organization or entire nations with your smile or with your guns or with your ideas or with your lies or with your money, and you rule with ruthless cunning or visionary wisdom or well-meaning incompetence.
You could end up becoming a dentist who dies of diabetes. You could be a prize-winning journalist with a dark secret. You could become a lawyer with a secret double life as a blogger. You could be an astronaut who makes first contact with an alien civilization. You could train to be a soldier only to die of a heart attack in boot camp. You could change the world, you could be a part of the world, you could fight the world and ultimately fail.
You could have been anyone, done anything. But because of who you chose to be and what happened to you and what you've done, right now you are none of the things you could have been, except who you are right now.
There are so many variables that make up our lives and our world. There are so many possible outcomes, so many places that we can go from here. And each of our actions - or inactions - moves us towards one outcome and away from another. We move in a shifting stream of potential fates, and every decision that we make plucks a fate out of potentia and makes it that much more real, and erases other destinies from the spectrum of possibility.
And as you grow older, as you make choices and choices are forced upon you, as your life moves upon its track, taking this turn and that turn, this branching future instead of that branching future, the ocean of possibilities shrinks and you begin to see the shore. The freedom of youth is the freedom of having your entire life before you, unlived. The curse of the aged is that distant shore looming nearer and nearer, as possibilities vanish and your life is laid down in a fixed path behind you.
Some uncertainty principle of alternate fates governs our knowledge of the choices we take: once we've gone down one road, we will never know what waited for us on all the others. It is impossible to chart the movement of our lives through the phase space of possible futures. All we can do is choose, and then look back upon the choices we have made and see where it has lead us.
The closest that we can get to perceiving those branching tracks of divergent futures is in that one, particular instant before the point of resolution: that moment just before the box is opened, before the shilling falls, before you turn the page to discover who the murderer is. You feel it when you sit before an empty screen, fingers poised as you begin to type. It is in that infinite space of a second that exists after you've asked the question, and she opens her mouth to answer. It is in that instant, that you feel the possibilities blossoming, the air become thick with potential, the multitude of probable futures stretching out before you. This is the moment when anything could happen.
And then you open the box, you type the first word, she gives her reply. And the manifold futures collapse into a singularity, the alternate realities vanish, and all you have left is what happened.
Opening Schrodinger's box is always disappointing, because now inside it is only one thing, when before that it could have been anything.
