Life is full of endless possibilities. Choose wisely.
There's nothing like an overabundance of choice to paralyze us. We are afraid of making the wrong decision. It's an irrational fear, though, because each path that is not taken disappears as soon as it is dismissed. In quantum theory it is possible that each selection we make spawns endless parallel universes, but they are immaterial. Even an inifinite number of arbitrary possibilities is each, by themselves, meaningless. It is only the observation of an individual event that gives it meaning, and even then it exists only in relation to us and to our perception of the universe. For what is our perception but a complex model we build for ourselves based on our measurements and experiences of the world around us?
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that as the measurements we want to make get small enough we reach a finite lower limit of our observational capabilities. For example if we want to see something large we can bombard it with light and let our eyes interpret the reflections. But if we want to look at something tiny, like a single photon of light, hitting it with other photons is clearly going to have a significant impact, pun intended. The very act of observation will change it's state so fully that we can only know one thing about it with any certainty. We can know exactly where it is at the price of having no idea where it is going to be scattered to next. Or we can know it's direction and speed without having any idea where it will be at any point.
Heisenberg's true genius, however, was not in adapting complex statistical methods to unpredictable quantum events. It was his ability to recognize an obvious, basic truth: if we focus too hard on where we are we lose sight of where we're going. Conversely, if we focus too hard on where we're going we lose sight of ourselves. It is the inability to look both ways at once that adds frailty and misery to the human condition. But it is precisely that lack that leads us to something even greater: imagination. It is our ability to conceptualize both views that allows us to find a comfortable middle ground of existence. We can continue to function without being bogged down by the sheer complexity of options that life gives us. It's the kind of fuzzy logic that is the elusive holy grail for AI systems because you just can't write a program that can stop and wonder at it's own smallness and it's own greatness at the same time.
Once we learn to see beyond the individual details the endless possibilities of life will no longer weigh us down; they will set us free. In the end the only wise choice is to choose to enjoy life as it comes. Carpe diem, friends.
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself." - Einstein