Googling Myself and Staying Grounded in the Mercer Multiverse

Have you ever googled yourself? I have, and it always keeps me grounded. After all, I am just one expression of Aaron Mercer in an apparent multiverse of us.

Ok, not a multiverse really. The other Aaron Mercers are not other versions of me. And I’m not an alternate reality for them. We are completely distinct. Different. Unrelated. 

We have no common storyline, as far as I can tell. No family ties, at least not in living memory. Some of us aren’t even in the same country. Any contact I may have had with the other Aaron Mercers would be purely incidental. Like, maybe we were in the same airport or standing in the same Disney line, and we had no idea that we held a common bond. Crazier small world situations have happened.

But even though we have the same name, we are, essentially, irrelevant to another. Yet, perhaps a significance underlies that unrelatedness. 

The Association of Aarons

Before I dig into that thought more, I should probably mention one particular reason why the association of Aarons keeps me grounded. It’s a humbling experience to google us. 

If you want, you can try it. You’ll probably see that I’m not the top search result. 

Ok, no shame there. But sometimes I don’t even make the first page. Of all the Aaron Mercers in all the world, I don’t always make the first cut even when I’m searching for myself from my own computer with all my digital cookies stored on it. 

You know who is all over those search pages? This guy. A pro-wrestler. 

Don’t be confused. This Aaron Mercer is definitely not me. I do appreciate you wondering about it though. My muscles aren’t ripped, and I suspect I would be toast in a cage match. But if this Aaron had my back, maybe I could tag him in before blacking out. I mean, I hope he’d have my back. A-A-rons need to stick together!

Another Aaron Mercer is a bullfighter. Dude! Check it out. No guts, no glory, right? 

I hope he’d have my back, too. Especially if I’m in Pamplona for the Running of the Bulls. Or if, in the words of the legendary Garth Brooks, I get intoxicated by the rodeo’s “bulls and blood,” “dust and mud,” and “the roar of a Sunday crowd.”

But I don’t really want to follow either of these guys into their rings of power. 

One Aaron Mercer I would like to chill with at his work is this Australian winemaker. I watched some of his story, and Aaron knows his stuff. He even makes organic and preservative-free wines. I’ve learned from my wife just how good those are. 

So count me in, Mercer. If only Hunter Valley wasn’t on the other side of the planet.

Among other Aarons in our association formed by my quick Google search is a music industry executive, a star hockey goalie, a scientist, an engineer, and an insurance agent. Oh, and this Aaron is a newly promoted brand manager for a company in the off-road industry. Congrats, man! 

Maybe the whole lot of us Aaron Mercers should celebrate Aaron’s promotion with some Mercer Wines at the vineyard down under? What do you say, guys? Who’s buying? The one with the highest search result?

Irrelevant Yet Important

It is fun to catch a glimpse of this imagined multiverse of Aaron Mercers on Google. But again, we are, in fact, irrelevant to one another. We share a name. A great name! But that’s it.

Still, while the other Aarons and I don’t know each other, I find their presence to be a welcome reminder of just how small I am in a big world. Also, as set apart as our narratives may be, I believe we are each intrinsically important as independent storylines in a much larger saga.

I’m reminded of a reference in Perelandra, which is part of the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy. Lewis is one of my favorite authors, by the way. So he may show up in these musings regularly. 

Anyhow, the section I’m thinking of is really just a small part of the book. It’s almost a tangent in the bigger planetary good-versus-evil origins story. Ransom, the hero, is chasing the diabolical remains of Weston on the wild high seas of Perelandra (Venus). In the middle of the long pursuit, Ransom notices a face looking up at him from the water. It’s a merman:

He was not at all frightened, and he guessed that the creature’s reaction to him was the very same as his to it—an uneasy, though not hostile, bewilderment. Each was wholly irrelevant to the other. They met as the branches of different trees meet when the wind brings them together.

They were irrelevant to one another. Their stories were branches of different trees. 

Similarly, later in the book, Ransom, exhausted from a battle royale and seemingly trapped in the underground depths of the planet, observes another creature from a great distance:

…on the car, upright, unshaken, stood a mantled form, huge and still and slender. And driving its strange team it passed on with insufferable majesty and went out of sight. Assuredly the inside of this world was not for man. But it was for something…. That thing, that swathed form in its chariot, was no doubt his fellow creature. It did not follow that they were equals or had an equal right in the under-land.

We learn nothing more about this creature in the book. Well, nothing definitive. There are some hints of a drumming sound and “a vast cathedral space which was more like the work of art than that of Nature,” but these are passing observations. Ransom is catching glimpses of another adventure, but it is a tale that has very little to do with his own.

It’s almost like a Google search. 

Well, way better than that, actually. Ransom gets to have a personal look at a story set apart and largely irrelevant to him, but with a majestic importance of its own.

If you think about it, we have the opportunity to experience that sort of richness everyday!

Leaving aside the apparent online “multiverse,” how many of our daily interactions are with people whose storylines are only tangentially connected to our own? Maybe it’s a neighbor we wave to while on a walk, your kid’s teacher, or a teller at the bank. All of them are living adventures distinct and and set apart from our own. And for every one of those individuals whose paths we may just briefly intersect, there are still millions more in the world we will never meet.

That is humbling to me. It keeps me grounded. And it helps me stay curious.

Thanks, Aarons.

Photo by Arkan Perdana on Unsplash