Choose your own Adventure

Back in grade school, before the world ever knew Harry Potter, some of the most popular books in our library were the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ series. These books were probably on the list of the most read and borrowed books from the library right below Enid Blyton’s or the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys series.

I used to read these ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. If you are unfamiliar with it, these were a series of children’s books where the reader assumes the role of the hero of the story and has to make choices that will determine his/her fate. The reader has to determine the hero’s next course of action by making decisions based on the choices given in the book.

The reader is asked to turn to a page in the book that corresponds to these choices. The plot then unfolds through these choices, leading to more choices and multiple possible endings. Sometimes, if the reader is a bit unlucky, the main character would encounter a rather unfortunate end (like death) because of the choices the reader made. Often, when the protagonist meets an untimely end in the book I was reading, I would cheat and ‘retrace my steps’ back to those ‘choices’ that led the character to his doom. I would then select the other choices, which turned out to be the best ones, and continue reading the story until I get to a satisfactory ending (or maybe until I get bored with the book). LOL.

That’s what I loved about these books. They were interactive even before the internet was as common as it is now.

More mature readers might scoff about this type of story format but, thinking about it now, those books really had some lessons to teach their readers, aside from the possible lessons found in the story itself.

Life is indeed a series of choices. These choices might either be easy or hard to make, but they always have consequences. In real life, as soon as you make a choice and consequences happen as a result of it, you cannot cheat and ‘retrace your steps’ or restart your life story somehow. You just have to suck it all in and have the courage to stand by your decision and face whatever consequences it will bring.

I have also made some decisions that I wish I did not do, or chose to do. Usually these decisions were made out of impulse. Some were made without thinking thoroughly about their consequences. I regret quite a lot of these decisions and spent stressful hours thinking about it. But ultimately, I just had to pick myself up and continue on to the next crossroad, the next set of choices and hope to make the right ones by then. As Eleanor Roosevelt said: One's philosophy is not best expressed in words, it is expressed in the choices one makes ... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility'