Mental Purgatory

It’s an idea you see all over the place. The movie Butterfly Effect was all about this idea. There was a TV show that lasted about three episodes (just long enough for me to realize it was great before they turned it off), called Then & Now that dealt with the idea. You hear the question all the time in interviews. If you could go back and change one thing about X, what would you change?

The stock market is great for making you kick yourself and wish you could change the past. With perfect hindsight, you can see exactly where you SHOULD have invested your money if you wanted to make millions. You can hear R Kelly brood close to the issue in his song “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time” embedded below (okay, so I’m not sure he’s actually talking about going back and CHANGING the past or instead, getting the chance to live it over again but it’s a good song so I don’t care – I just wanted to embed it).

And so, this very question is what I want to talk about in what you might find cliche in parts, but frankly, I really don’t care. I’ll say what I say, and that’s what I’ll say.

My answer here, and the answer you would expect (but not necessarily always believe), is that I wouldn’t change anything. There are things I regret doing in my past, there are chances I missed that I wish I’d taken, but the past is the past. I’ve learned from those mistakes, I’ve found new opportunities today because of the ones I missed before. In large part, who I am today is built off of all of those things I might try and change in the past. For instance, my closest friendships today are people that only a few months ago, I never would have guessed I’d be such close friends with. However, some potentially negative events happened that steered my life in a different direction and brought me to where I am today and closer to those people.

I feel like wanting to go back and change the past is a concession that you’re not happy with who you are today. You’d rather change the past and become a completely different person than continue as who you are today.

This post was largely triggered yesterday by a friend who talked about her spring break and said she’d wished some things had gone differently. However, this post isn’t an attack on her but merely reflecting on the fact that we ALL feel this way at many points in our life. And even if I hadn’t commented on everything else about the past, an equally important facet of the entire ordeal is that we CANT change the past. What’s done is done.

Because we can’t change the past, it’s not worth brooding over and contemplating the what ifs. Learn from the past, but instead of worrying about changing it, look forward and ask how you can change your present and future to what you want it to be.