I do like reading suggestions, though I usually don't take them once a story is finished - mainly because I can't get back into a story and grasp its gestalt well enough to revise it, without doing a big revision. I think I will use the phrase "why not accept a mere permutation of the same event?" sometime - there are probably many situations where that could be surprising and insightful.

Getting into what "I" was thinking at that moment is a can of worms... you could go in a lot of directions, such as how his loss of Julia might have caused his refusal to join a collective.