When I play sudoku—which I really enjoy and, frankly, am pretty good at—I usually work through the puzzle in numerical order. Sometimes I start with one and work my way up to nine. Other times I start with nine and work my way down.
Today was a “start with one” day. And not much was happening until I got to seven, when the puzzle suddenly opened up. Sevens were going everywhere. Then a couple of eights. Then almost all the nines.
“I guess I started at the wrong end,” I thought—as if I’d done something wrong.
Then a second thought corrected the first.
There was a two I’d placed early on that eliminated a possible spot for a seven. There were two squares that could only be a three or a five, which meant the first nine could only go in one place.
It wasn’t where I started that made the difference. It was the early steps that made the later ones possible.
The myth of a better path
I’ve been there in much more consequential areas of life. We—or maybe it’s just me?—sometimes find ourselves stuck in regret that doesn’t hold up under much examination. I wish I hadn’t made that mistake. I wish I’d never taken that job, been (or stayed) in that relationship, bought that house… In many ways, those thoughts are just more complicated versions of my foolish sudoku regret of starting at the wrong end.
The Midnight Library captures this idea well. A woman gets to experience the lives she might have lived—different careers, relationships, choices—each one shaped by a single change. But that’s the thing: one change doesn’t alter just one outcome. It changes everything.
The only move that matters
We like to imagine that a different choice would have led to a better life. But that story depends on pretending everything else would have stayed the same. It rarely does. The life we have is not a consolation prize for the life we didn’t choose; it’s the result of thousands of small steps that made everything else possible.
The temptation, of course, is to keep replaying the puzzle—to imagine how things might look if we’d just started somewhere else. But the only board we ever actually get to work on is the one in front of us. The next move still matters. The puzzle is still opening. And whatever comes next can only happen from right here.