I saw the film ‘Arrival’ last night. In the film Amy Adams plays a well established linguistics professor and is asked to meet some aliens and decipher their language. She becomes very involved with the aliens and starts to learn their way of communication. After months and months of work she discovers that the aliens don’t want to attack the earth, but that they have a gift. The gift of ‘time’. They don’t see time as something linear and Amy’s character gains the ability to see the future. She can see a baby, growing into a young girl, which dies of a rare disease. At the end of the movie she gets together with Jeremy Renner’s character. Who will be the father of that child she saw in her visions of the future. Right at the end she asks him: “If you could see your whole life laid out in front of you with all the ups and downs, would you change something?”.

This questions made me think. She knew her daughter was going to die pf that rare disease, yet she chose to still go ahead and live her life just as she saw it in her future visions. I talked with my friend about that and he said that if she had changed anything she would have missed out on the good bits as well. That is true. I keep thinking, if I had known what life in the U.K would be like before moving here, would I still have moved? The answer is yes, despite all the downs, there were many ups and it helped me become the person I am today. You could ask yourself that question about your whole life. Of course there are things that I would like to change, or mistakes i wished I had never made. Yet it was all a learning curve. And yes although she knew that her daughter was going to die, she still decided to have her, because otherwise she would have missed out on all the fantastic memories and moments with her little girl. If you were able to see your whole life laid out in front of you, would you want to change it?