Polarized realities: When one moment means a thousand things

I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction. In particular, I love the concept of parallel worlds: that there exist alternate universes which spin in synchrony with our own, different by fractional or exponential magnitudes.

As I grow older, I’m realizing that the multiverse is real—just not in the way we might think.

Each of us is built from DNA as unique as the swirls of our thumbprints. Our chronology of lived experiences serves as a building block as we age, informing our identities and shaping how we perceive the world around us. We inhabit our own realities, live our own truths. And altogether, these eight billion universes give us human civilization.

We might think certain events should elicit a uniform reaction. The pride of a promotion, the anger of a wrongdoing. If only emotions were that straightforward. Instead, the same moment can lead to vastly juxtaposed responses; even when, especially when, it impacts a mass audience. A concert, a flood, a hurricane.

Last May, I was backpacking through a suburb of Tokyo when, as if it appeared from thin air, a car slammed into a young boy several meters behind me. There were two dozen strangers around him on that sidewalk. Tourists and locals. Grandfathers, fathers, and sons. One or two ran into the street to help the boy as he cradled his broken arm. A few pulled out their phones to call the police. More stood on the concrete in a somber quiet: hands over their mouths, passing comments and questions in a hush. After a moment, most continued on, determining the situation to be in more capable hands than their own.

I can’t say that there is a right way to respond to tragedy. Perhaps there are good replies and bad ones, but “right” is a matter of opinion. Should I have agonized over that little boy’s pain and wondered about the sequence of events through which disaster struck? Or should I have moved on like the other strangers on that sidewalk eventually did, forcing myself forward to complete the next task on my list?

No choice is better or more humane. Each is simply a response, a decision driven by our building blocks which, once made, will become a building block in and of itself. Therein lies our jigsaw world, an honest reality shaped by learned truths.

Of course, from a scientific sense, there is such a thing as right and wrong. We know that the Earth is not flat, that water quenches thirst, that two plus two will never equal five no matter how passionately someone insists otherwise. But when we consider matters which are less absolute, and even matters of morality that we might think should be absolute, perspective becomes an incredibly important thing.

There are few topics on which all of us truly agree. When considering the variability of our lives, that makes sense. We are polar beings; therefore, the world is a polarized place. Our disagreements are not simply a matter of stubbornness or ignorance, but the natural consequence of carrying different lenses polished by time, culture, and circumstance. A debate about politics is rarely only about policy: it is about someone’s upbringing, their family history, the triumphs they’ve celebrated and the injustices they’ve endured. Even in the smallest choices—what we eat, who we trust, how we define happiness—our decisions are complicated by our alternate universes, by lived experiences that are too complex to summarize in a note scribbled in a margin. To label a side as inherently right or wrong is to erase the many nuances of human life that brought each person to their stance in the first place.

To live life authentically while abiding by the most universal values… I think that is the best any of us can do. Honesty, compassion, respect: these principles echo across cultures and centuries, even if they’re practiced in different forms. Honesty in one place may look like bluntness, while in another it takes the form of quiet integrity. Compassion may mean showing up with food after a loss, or giving someone space to grieve. Respect can manifest as obedience, or as questioning an authority figure to uphold a greater truth. The forms shift, but the essence remains. These values act as bridges across our parallel realities, common threads woven through diverging roads.

Living by our values is not about chasing perfection; it is about striving for alignment. We will falter, of course. Our honesty may sometimes slip into cruelty, our compassion into indulgence, our respect into passivity. But to aim for these values, to let them guide us through the gray areas where there is no clear right or wrong, is perhaps the closest thing we have to a universal compass.

In a world where perspectives clash like tectonic plates, returning to these shared principles allows us to orient ourselves. They do not erase our differences, but they remind us that beneath our individual universes lies a bedrock of humanity we all stand on. And maybe that’s enough: not to unify us completely, but to keep us from drifting into galaxies apart.

Such a standard of living does not come without conflict, of course. Our values can collide, just as our universes do. My honesty might bruise someone else’s pride; my compassion for one person may unintentionally cause harm to another. But conflict is just the natural friction of parallel worlds brushing against each other. It can be managed, so long as we accept that our truths are filtered, that our perspectives are tinted glass rather than clear windows. If we remember this—that others are just as shaped by their realities as we are by ours—then perhaps we can navigate the tension without losing sight of our shared humanity. Our universes don’t have to be galaxies apart.

I never found out what happened to that boy. I stood on the side of the road for a long while after the accident, watching a group of adults tend to him, hoping he would be okay. In my mind, I imagine him healed, his arm strong. Perhaps the scar still aches in the rain, but I hope that as he grows, this will become another building block at the foundation of his collection.

Somewhere, in his world, that moment lives differently than it does in mine.

I wonder about the car driver, too. About the paramedics. About the two dozen strangers on the sidewalk. Did they go home that evening and hug their children tighter? Did they hesitate the next time they crossed the street? Do they still think about the boy from time to time, or have their lives been overrun by other, more memorable things?

I’ll never know. And maybe that’s the point. Each of us walked away from the same street, into different stories. Each of us folded that moment into our own universe of truths.

Reality, in the end, is not just what happens. It’s what it becomes in the parallel worlds we each inhabit—and how those worlds continue to spin, side by side, never quite the same.

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