The Worst Day of Your Life by Edward Packard

Such was the state of my brain that considerations like that never entered my mind, and that was a major problem. In no situation did I think that an action I was contemplating would be immoral and therefore I must not do it nor in any situation did I think that an action would be immoral, but decide to do it anyway.

Looking back, I’m appalled by much of my behavior, decade after decade. I was sleepwalking through life, and as a consequence making a lot of bad decisions. Countless things about you, such as your genetic makeup and life experiences, change dynamics and produce situations in which you fail to perceive options or unthinkingly dismiss them and seize upon one that looms large in your consciousness, and events seem to be happening in rapid sequence before you can assimilate them, so that you have little or no sense of making decisions, and in fact you are not - you are traveling through time as if floating downstream on a river raft, poling now and then and sometimes hanging up on a shoal, not paying proper attention, maybe falling asleep, and finding yourself almost on the opposite bank, where the wind took you, which is not where you meant to be, all the while missing something, and you may not even know what it is.Īt least that’s the way it was for me while I was growing up and after growing up. Rather, the paths you take are determined largely by chance and by what kind of person you are. It wasn’t until many decades later that I realized that the way life plays out doesn’t just turn on conscious decisions made at key junctures. The idea was that they would have to think about the pros and cons of each possible choice and analyze which would be best. When I thought up the idea of a book in which “you” are the main character and make decisions from time to time leading to multiple plot lines and endings, I realized that, as the story moved along, I ought to give readers plausible choices as to what to do. To explain this, I have to go back a ways. My view from ninety is a lot different from the one I had at twenty, fifty, and even eighty.

The Worst Day of Your Life by Edward Packard