Birthday wish
I know someone who spent their ith birthday reading the ith page of every book on their shelf (atleast for a particular i). I can see this breadth-first search leading somewhere over time!
Given time, lot of things become possible. Sometime ago I read a story (by Haruki Murakami) of a woman who works as a waitress in a restaurant and ends up being at work on her 20th birthday. She meets the owner by chance and he proposes to grant her one wish. Much later, she is speaking to the narrator and asks him what his single wish would have been when he was 20. He can't think of any. I have been trying to understand this for some time and this morning, at a corner in washington square park, felt like I connected with an answer. I can think of many (usual or unusual) wishes for my life at this moment, but I can't think of what I would have wished for (besides the obvious answers people suggest) at a certain moment in the past like on my 20th birthday knowing I would have thought hard about the question even at that time and would have tried to come up with an unusual wish!
Given time, lot of things become possible. Sometime ago I read a story (by Haruki Murakami) of a woman who works as a waitress in a restaurant and ends up being at work on her 20th birthday. She meets the owner by chance and he proposes to grant her one wish. Much later, she is speaking to the narrator and asks him what his single wish would have been when he was 20. He can't think of any. I have been trying to understand this for some time and this morning, at a corner in washington square park, felt like I connected with an answer. I can think of many (usual or unusual) wishes for my life at this moment, but I can't think of what I would have wished for (besides the obvious answers people suggest) at a certain moment in the past like on my 20th birthday knowing I would have thought hard about the question even at that time and would have tried to come up with an unusual wish!
posted by metoo at 7:00 AM
2 Comments:
Another followup question is, would you want to un-wish now the wish that you would have had at 20.
In the story, the narrator asks if she regretted the wish she made. But I like the more targeted question you have posed!
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