The Corridor of Possibilities

What we choose to notice becomes our world.

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw’s The Quantum Universe, where they describe reality not as a fixed series of events, but as a set of possibilities. At the most fundamental level, the universe is not deterministic  --  it’s made of likelihoods. Everything that can happen, does happen… somewhere. And what we really experience is just one thread through that vast probabilistic fabric.

That idea stayed with me.

Not in the flashy multiverse sense, but in the quieter realization that we’re walking through a corridor of possibilities all the time. Every thought, every hesitation, every word left unsaid -- each one nudges us toward a different version of our life. Not dramatically. Not always visibly. But consistently, subtly, inevitably.

Most of the time, we don’t notice. We mistake familiarity for inevitability. We call it fate or habit or routine. But zoom out, just a little, and you start to see the weave. The soft branching of paths you didn’t know you were choosing. The conversation you nearly didn’t have. The day you almost stayed home. The job you took, or didn’t. The book you picked up. The one you wrote.

When I think about my work, I think about this corridor often.

We build systems to make predictions. To collapse uncertainty into answers. But prediction is just one version of the future -- one possibility that becomes louder because we choose to listen to it. And sometimes, by amplifying the predictable, we miss the precious improbabilities, the serendipities. The strange deviations. The spontaneous miracles that don’t fit the model.

The quantum view reminds me that nothing is fixed. Not even us. That who we are is a result of a million interferences; some inherited, some chosen, some accidental. And that within the noise, there is still music.

So maybe free will is not about total control. Maybe it’s about awareness. About paying attention to the corridor you’re in, and the doors you keep walking past. About pausing long enough to ask, is this the thread I want to follow? And if not -- what if I just shifted, slightly, into a different one?

The universe allows it.
Somewhere, it’s already happening.

Recently, I chose to close a door. Quietly. No dramatic gesture, no final word — just a gentle pull, a soft click. It was a door I had once worked hard to open, and for a long time I thought I had to keep it ajar out of gratitude, or habit, or fear. But when I turned back, I saw how narrow the corridor had become. And I remembered: other paths exist. They always have.

Now, I walk forward lighter, curious again. Possibility makes a sound if you listen closely.

And I’m learning to listen.

Love, Vx