The first week of the school year has come and gone, and so many things feel weird to me right now. It reminds me of a topic that came up in one of my favorite “Stuff You Should Know” podcast episodes: a thought experiment called quantum suicide. (I promise this isn’t going to be anywhere near as morbid as it sounds, and the explanation is a bit of a stretch, so bear with me for a paragraph or two.) One of the reasons I like that episode so much is because I’ve listened to it at least twenty times and still only understand about half of it, so each replay brings me a tiny bit closer to wrapping my head around the concept: Imagine a man sits in an empty room with a partially-loaded gun pointed at him. There’s a button in front of him he’s supposed to press, and when he does it will activate a machine that’s supposed to do some particle physics thing I won’t even try to explain since I’m sure I’d fail at it spectacularly. When the button is pressed, the trigger is pulled. According to this experiment, the gun would never go off regardless of how many times the button was pressed and the trigger was pulled, because each time the trigger is pulled the man is performing an action that splits the universe into parallel realities, and the version of the man in the other universe is the one who gets shot and dies. The idea here is that each time one of us makes a decision, a separate reality breaks off to follow the path of the choice we didn’t make. Following that “logic,” there isn’t just one universe but rather an infinite number of alternate universes that have come into existence following every decision ever made.
And in these early days of the school year I’ve felt like I woke up living in one of the alternative realities created by someone’s decision-making. Sure, every new year brings changes and discoveries with it, but right now this one feels a little top-heavy. I wake up about the same time and I go to work at the same school, but I spend my day in a different classroom. I’m teaching the same grade, but with a grade level team of entirely new people. I’m working with the same curriculum, but it’s been revised over the summer so I have to figure out exactly how what I’ve been doing for the past several years is new. I’ve been using the same schedule for two or three years, but now it’s shuffled to something completely different. I’m working as a part of the same staff (more or less) but there are a few new key players in my radius while some key players I had come to rely on seeing aren’t a part of my daily life anymore. I share my section of the hallway with people who in past years I could go for weeks without seeing for more than a few minutes at a time, and now I see them more often than anyone else.
Since I’m someone who is dependent on a certain amount of routine to feel completely at ease, all of this different takes a little getting used to. And don’t get me wrong -- I’m not saying there's some wholesale downgrade to my year because of these changes. Granted, some are harder to adjust to than others. But at the same time a lot of what's new about the year holds promise for exciting things to come. So my year is starting off with me walking around through this somewhat entertaining mixture of discombobulation and optimism. Which is really the case every year, to some degree. But for me, it's just more noticeable this time around.
It all makes me wonder a little about how the year is starting off for the version of me that wound up in the other reality....
