The Sound of Thunder

by Ray Bradbury was a short story that I read for an English class in high school. One of my older brothers had read Farhenheit 451 for the same reason. After reading “The Sound of Thunder”, I was a Ray Bradbury fan. It was the first story I read based on the effect had on the present when changing the past. The Thinking Homeschoolers’ topic is along those lines: What Would You Be Doing Right Now If You Had No Kids?

Over the last 25 years I’ve read a good number of both science fiction and fantasy novels on variations including alternate and parallel universes. So, I look at the question along the lines of what would another me be doing in a slightly different universe if the other me had not had children? I can see lots of possibilities and rather than try to fits bits and pieces into my answer, I’m just going to tell you about one of them. Since I do have children and prefer it this way, it doesn’t particularly matter (to me at least) whether it is the most probable :D

I can see myself being an author. I don’t expect that I would be writing about homeschooling. What I think would be most likely is that I would be a modern day C.S. Lewis. I probably would not be in New Brunswick and possibly not in Canada at all. I would be writing about similar subjects to those that C.S Lewis wrote about.

Even though I thought about what I would say in this post, what I wrote in the previous paragraph wasn’t that difficult to arrive at. Here is my thinking:

Having read much of C.S. Lewis’s writing, I believe that the question he tried to address for himself that provided much of the content in his writing was, ‘Why?’ I had already been on the trail of that question for a number of years prior to meeting Andrea. I think both Andrea and the kids have enabled me to see things related to that which otherwise would have been more difficult to recognize. But I believe that life would have always lead me back to that question.

Although I haven’t written many ‘thinking’ posts lately, the archives have a fair number of posts where I cut through logical inconsistencies. A fair amount of C.S. Lewis’ writing was exactly that. Secondly, the reason I haven’t been writing that type of post lately isn’t that I haven’t thought of any to write. Rather it’s because that after being largely separated from family for over a year, I’ve made a conscious decision to spend time with my family when the opportunities present themselves. I write in what time is left over.

I made the same decision related to my career several times in the past. Over the years, I turned down or dismissed opportunities that would have lead to larger fortunes in favour of family life. Without a family to consider, I expect I would have taken some of those opportunities. In turn that would have enabled me to either retire or semi-retire from the IT career by now. I’d have the financial resources for support through what might be a lengthly period to establish a writing career.