A Life That Could Have Been Different

What stayed with me most after watching The Remains of the Day was not the love story Stevens failed to live. It was the moment, years later, when he seemed to realize that his life might have been different.

Perhaps that is what unsettles us most: not that a life was bad, but that another life may have been possible—and that this becomes clear only much later.

This is not only Stevens's story.

Sometimes we remain for years in a job we have wanted to leave. Sometimes we cannot walk away from a relationship we already believe has ended. Sometimes we want to leave the city we live in and imagine another way of living somewhere else; then the streets we know, the people we are used to, and the same routines quietly pull us back in.

Sometimes we stay not where we are well, but where we know the terrain.

Because the unknown carries not only possibility, but risk. What is familiar, even when it is difficult, is at least predictable.

Perhaps that is why a "comfort zone" is not always a place of comfort. Sometimes it is simply the place where we know exactly how uncomfortable we will be.

And what keeps us there is not always only the world outside us.

"I can't do it anyway."

"It's too late at my age."

"Things never change."

"There is nothing better than this."

"I tried once."

"This is just my life."

At first, we may hear some of these sentences from other people. But after a while, no one outside us needs to repeat them. We begin composing the language of our own limits.

This is what makes the idea of "learned helplessness" so thought-provoking. If a person believes for long enough that nothing can be changed, there may come a point when they stop trying.

But an important distinction appears here:

Acceptance and becoming accustomed to something are not the same thing.

Acceptance can mean looking honestly at a reality we cannot change. Becoming accustomed to it can mean no longer questioning something that might still be changed. It is the disappearance of the distance between "it didn't work" and "it will never work."

A line from verse 11 of Surah Ar-Ra'd gives me another question here: "God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves."

That does not mean people are responsible for everything that happens to them. Much of life lies beyond our will. Yet treating our own agency as completely irrelevant in the areas we can influence may be another form of surrender.

Perhaps the real question is this:

Does change begin when the circumstances outside us change, or when we notice that there is still something we can change?

Let Stevens's story remain here.

Because the question is no longer about his life.

It is about the doors in ours that may still be open, although we have come to believe they are closed.

Where Do We Look for What Cannot Change?

While thinking about this question, I returned to Edward Burtynsky's Shifting Topography exhibition at Borusan Contemporary. Through large-scale photographs of industry, mines, quarries, water, and transformed landscapes, the exhibition makes visible the marks human beings leave on the earth. Images that can initially appear beautiful—even mesmerizing—reveal another truth when we keep looking: a landscape altered by human hands.

We can become accustomed to change itself.

When something breaks suddenly, we react. But when it changes a little every day, when the difference between yesterday and today is small, we often stop being surprised by it.

Perhaps this is one way normalization works.

We react to what happens all at once; what happens gradually, we begin to mistake for life itself.

Burtynsky's photographs make visible something we may have been looking at for a long time without really seeing.

And perhaps the first condition of change is simply this: seeing what has changed.

But another question appears here.

Does preserving something old mean refusing to change it?

That is why Neolokal's approach in Karaköy fits this line of thought so naturally. The restaurant draws on Anatolia's traditional recipes, endangered ingredients, and culinary memory, yet rather than freezing them in place, it reinterprets them with contemporary techniques. In its own description, Neolokal calls itself a bridge between the old and the new.

Does protecting something mean leaving it untouched?

Perhaps the opposite is sometimes true: the only way to keep something alive is to change it enough to carry it into a new time.

A recipe can change and keep its memory.

A city can transform without necessarily losing its spirit.

And a person can change the story they have told about themselves for years without becoming someone else.

Perhaps change is not a rejection of the past, but the removal of the past's absolute authority over the future.

The essence of a dish may not lie in reproducing every line of a recipe exactly. It may live instead in fidelity to the ingredient, the season, the labor, and the memory while allowing them to take a new form. In a kitchen, change does not have to be betrayal. Sometimes it is continuity itself.

Could the same be true of a life?

Can we let go of our habits without letting go of ourselves?

Can we live differently without denying our past?

Can we make room for an unfamiliar possibility without losing what we know?

And here I find myself looking toward the sky.

On August 12, the Moon will pass between Earth and the Sun. A total solar eclipse will be visible from Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal, while a much larger part of the Northern Hemisphere will experience a partial eclipse.

We cannot change that.

We cannot change the Moon's orbit. We cannot move the eclipse to an earlier hour. We cannot make totality last a few minutes longer.

Some things truly are beyond us.

Perhaps acceptance begins there.

But there is a vast difference between an event in the sky that we cannot alter and placing everything in our own lives on the same list of "things that cannot change."

We cannot change the Moon's orbit.

But we can decide whether to look up.

Perhaps that is one of the hardest distinctions in a life:

To tell the difference between what is truly unchangeable and what only appears unchangeable because it has not changed for a very long time.

One of the striking points in more recent work on learned helplessness is that the issue is not merely helplessness itself; it is also the experience of control—the discovery that something we do can still affect an outcome. Not controlling everything, but recognizing that an action can still matter.

Perhaps we do not need to believe we can transform our entire lives in order to begin again.

Perhaps it is enough, at first, to see that we can change one thing.

A decision.

An application.

A conversation.

A "no."

A "yes."

Trying a door once more.

None of these may change a life on its own.

But each can return a more fundamental sentence to us:

Something I do can still have a consequence.

One day, looking back, all of us will have things about which we ask, "Could it have been different?" For some of them, the answer will truly be no. Time does not reverse. Losses do not return. Some doors really do close.

But what if the answer to some of them is still yes?

Perhaps we do not need to change our whole lives today.

Perhaps we need first to ask which door is actually locked, and which only looks closed because we have not tried the handle for a very long time.

Because sometimes a person stays not because there is no way out, but because helplessness has become familiar.

And perhaps the first sign of change is not leaving immediately.

It is noticing again that there may still be somewhere to go.

First a person accepts, then grows accustomed,
Slowly gets used to it, and finds themselves giving up.
An emptiness remains; it is no longer called pain,
Time erases the truth and leaves behind its darkness.

• • •

Editorial Note and Rights Notice

This essay is an original AGORA work by Orkun Akçasarı, developed from his personal viewing experience, observations, reading, and cultural reflection. The film, exhibition, restaurant, scientific study, institution, and religious text mentioned here are used for criticism, review, cultural commentary, and factual verification. Their inclusion does not imply sponsorship, representation, endorsement, or an official relationship. The narrative structure, selection and sequencing of subjects, transitions, interpretations, original phrasing, title, and presentation are the work of Orkun Akçasarı. Unauthorized reproduction, republication, adaptation, translation, narration, attribution to another publication, or commercial use is prohibited. Short quotations permitted by law should identify the author, full article title, publication date, and original link. Sources were checked against information accessible on August 9, 2026; material errors supported by reliable evidence will be corrected transparently. © 2026 Orkun Akçasarı. All rights reserved.

References

British Film Institute. The Remains of the Day (1993). Accessed August 9, 2026. https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/38c090b6-bf34-5809-9a4c-f350b62ce37c/the-remains-of-the-day

Maier, Steven F.; Seligman, Martin E. P.. Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367 (2016). Accessed August 9, 2026. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27337390/

Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı. Ra'd Suresi 11. Ayet Tefsiri. Accessed August 9, 2026. https://kuran.diyanet.gov.tr/tefsir/Ra%27d-suresi/1718/11-ayet-tefsiri

Borusan Contemporary. Edward Burtynsky: Shifting Topography. Accessed August 9, 2026. https://www.borusancontemporary.com/en/edward-burtynsky-shifting-topography-book_2455

Neolokal. Neolokal Istanbul: Bridging Past and Future. Accessed August 9, 2026. https://www.neolokal.com/en/neolokal_en/

NASA Science. Total Solar Eclipse on August 12, 2026. Accessed August 9, 2026. https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/total-solar-eclipse-on-august-12-2026/