. . . what would you change?
Had an interesting conversation yesterday after the church service with a woman who was visiting from out of town. Isn’t it great when you meet someone for the first time and make a real connection? That’s what happened here.
Anyway, one of our talking points was the difference between the way we see things now vs. how we saw them back in high school. I said, “Wouldn’t you just love to go back in time, shake your little sixteen-year-old self by the shoulders, and say, ‘Knock it off!'” I was particularly remembering my tendency to get mad crushes on people and how my mom would say to me, “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve!” How much better it would have been if I could have seen how silly I was being and how much emotional energy I was wasting.
Then my new friend said something very wise: “But you wouldn’t know what you do today without having gone through those experiences. They were your source of wisdom. So if you hadn’t done what you did back then, you wouldn’t be able to go back and tell yourself how to do better.” It’s the old time-travel conundrum, put into a more mature context than is usually the case: if you go back and change something in your life, how would that change affect the present? In this case, the only way I could tell myself how to behave better is to have gone through the very scenarios that I would avoid if I were told to do so by my future self, who then wouldn’t know enough to tell me how to behave better. (I have always maintained that time travel is impossible anyway if you travel backwards or forwards in your own life, because then you’d be in two places at once.) So all you can do is to try to learn as much as you can the first time around–because that’s all you get!
I wrote last week about my mild obsession with Serial and its spinoffs. All of us fans would, I’m sure, love to travel back in time to January 13, 1999, and stand in the hallway of Woodlawn High School that morning to see if Adnan really asked Hae for a ride. We’d love to climb into her car after school and see what really happened–or see what was going to happen and prevent it. I’d love to go back in time and retrieve those old jeans I threw out that had my engagement/wedding ring set in the pockets. (A much less severe loss.) I feel a certain tug to sit through another viewing of Interstellar, last year’s blockbuster movie that dealt with communicating back through time to save humanity. I think that’s what it was about, anyway. Gideon had to explain it to me, as usual.
What would you like to change in your past? Would that change really produce the result you’re looking for?