Many years ago I wrote what is called feature articles for a newspaper. Most of the articles were about people. Everyone has a story but most people don’t think they do. They’ll say something like, “I’ve just led an ordinary life.” If you’d dig a little deeper, you’d often find an offhand choice changed their entire life. I was thinking this morning about a young married couple I knew. I had gotten to know him through his writing and of course, he introduced me to his wife. Even all these years later I’ll use the fictitious names I gave them in the article to protect them, so here is Joe and Jane’s story. Joe is very intelligent, but he was what you would call perpetual student. He was always going to college somehow but was never being able to graduate because he never completed a major. Jane was also very intelligent. Jane was very slim and so was Joe. They seem to be very healthy people physically. I did sometimes wondered about Joe mentally, but I got a chance to do an in-depth interview with Jane with a view of writing a feature article about them. Even though I knew Jane, she was very shy at the start of the interview for reasons I would understand by the end of it. We started by talking about how she had met Joe. After that Jane explained that one day they had decided to explore the hippie way of life. Jane said at first it was fun. However, as they got into drugs things changed. Jane confessed she had lost track of what happened in certain time periods. She told me that they had tried every drug they could find and a multitude of combinations of drugs together. She went on to say that she had had sex with every man she knew during that time period and many she didn’t. She explained it was never for money, but sometimes men would give her drugs afterward. She would take them not knowing or caring what they were. Jane said that she and Joe tried to escape the hippie lifestyle and were beginning to be successful. She was proud of Joe getting good grades in college and she was happy with the part-time job she had. It seemed to be a good feeling story. It was little over a year after I interviewed Jane that I came across Joe and we went and had coffee. When I asked about Jane, Joe told me that she was in a mental institution. When I asked why Joe explained that she had “come apart.” When I asked why Joe explained that the doctors weren’t sure but they thought all of the drugs that she had taken had a lasting effect and scrambled her brain. Joe disappeared not long after that and I learned from a mutual friend that he had moved to be closer to his wife in the mental institution. I thought about Jane’s casual remark about their mutual decision to explore the hippie way of life. There is no way either she or Joe could have predicted the catastrophe that decision would bring to them.
I guess you might expect me to warn you about making decisions, but that’s not realistic. We make decisions all the time and one seemingly small one can change our lives forever, but we can never predict what that small one will be.
