schrödinger once imagined a cat sealed in a box, alive and dead at the same time, suspended in probability until someone opens the lid. i suspect a small version of my childhood lived in a similar box. inside it was a priest.
i must have been seven, maybe eight. my best friend and i were having the standard childhood conversation about what we would become when we grew up. the strange thing is i didn’t have an answer. i was a child quite content with the act of existing - the simple, unhurried business of being alive. the future seemed like a problem for some distant bureaucrat in a department i hadn’t visited yet.
my friend, however, had a plan. he said he wanted to become a priest.
i had spent some time around catholic relatives, so the idea wasn’t completely alien. i had seen the mass, the hymns, the slow, deliberate choreography of it all. i’ve always found it interesting - the calmness of it, the symmetry, the strange serenity that hung over the entire ritual. there was a structure to it that felt almost mathematical - everything had its place.
i remember thinking: hmm, nice.
i have always been somewhat over-reactionary when i find something interesting. it’s a recurring theme in my life. if i decide crankshafts are fascinating today, the next ten days might disappear into a feverish void of reading about internal combustion, diagrams, and mechanical tolerances. so naturally, the priesthood, for a brief, intense moment, became the most coherent future available to me.
i went home and told my mother.
she laughed.
her reaction was a full, chesty combination of disbelief and amusement - the universal parental response to a child’s temporary fantasy.
“you want to be a priest?”
“yes.”
the laughter continued.
eventually, i cried. partly out of the sheer injustice of not being taken seriously, and partly because, at that age, a thwarted conviction feels indistinguishable from a grand tragedy. my mother’s laughter was the first bit of light hitting the box, and the version of me in the vestments didn’t like the exposure.
the priest inside the box lived on for a little while after that. but he never grew particularly strong. the truth is, my interest in the priesthood never matured enough to actually die; it just stayed at the level of childhood fascination - a pleasant, aesthetic attraction to the serenity of the ritual. it was a “what if” that i carried around like a smooth stone in my pocket.
ironically, life later placed me right back inside the experiment. i ended up attending a somewhat minor seminary school.
and i hated it.
it turned out that the thing i admired from a distance - structure - was intolerable once it was actually imposed on me. i realized a fundamental truth about my own wiring: i like structure when it emerges from my own curiosity. i dislike it intensely when another human being dictates it to me.
the difference is subtle, but it is absolute.
a priest’s life is almost entirely a borrowed structure. bells, hours, liturgy, obedience, routine. it is a life whose beauty lies precisely in the fact that it is not self-authored. you step into a stream that has been flowing for two thousand years and you let it carry you.
for a kid who wants to take the engine apart to see how the crankshaft turns, that kind of obedience is a slow suffocation.
that, i suspect, is where the wavefunction finally collapsed.
science eventually replaced whatever vague religious curiosity i had. my obsessions migrated elsewhere - toward machines (which i interestingly found tepid, again), ideas, systems, and the kinds of problems that reward restless curiosity. the priest quietly evaporated from the probability distribution of my life, replaced by a version that prefers building his own structures rather than inheriting them.
but i still find the thought amusing.
somewhere in the unopened box of childhood possibilities, there is a version of me waking up in the blue light of early morning to say mass. he moves through a carefully structured life of hymnals, silence, and ritual. he doesn’t worry much about the chaos of the world because his day is already written for him in a leather-bound book.
i suspect he would have been much calmer than i am.
fortunately for everyone involved, the lid stayed shut.
i’m happy to leave him there in the quiet while i stay out here.