Sometimes I wish that I could go back in time and take something back. That I could fix whatever "buck-up" I just made to make things right again, at least right in the eyes of 5-minute-ago-[[Neo]].
But to what avail? What purpose? Why go back in time to erase a mistake and a lesson learned just to have to repeat it at a later date? Why put myself through the torture of another mistake, loss, and heartache in the future, to recover the expense of the past?
It's a good thing we can't go back and redo everything again...unfortunately though we CAN travel back in time to relive them over and over again. How? It's easy...we do it all the time. Some of us even travel FORWARD in time to prelive our mistakes in the future...and we do it without even realizing what we're doing.
Consider this...you say something hurtful and ugly to someone you care about. Once you say it, you can't take it back...words are a double edged sword. They cut to defend, and they cut to offend. But when you make the mistake, and then sit there and relive it by thinking about it over and over, you have effectively traveled back into the past via your MIND and are reliving the same mistake over and over. There's nothing you can do about it, but yet people are drawn to reliving their misery ad nauseum until they have stressed themselves about it so much that they can't take it anymore.
But while they're in the past reliving their mistakes, they're missing out on the present that they're going through, wasting those moments traveling through the past.
The same thing is true for the worriers. People that sit there and think about all the scary things that could happen to them in the future, and the outcomes of those situations, and the consequences of everything that could possibly happen because they decided to wear a blue shirt today instead of the green one. The people that can't make a decision because they are afraid of what could happen.
So they spend their present time traveling to the future to see what could happen to them, and all the horrific things they play over and over in their mind.
We've only got one straight line of time, with a finite amount of time to experience it. Should you really be wasting the time you've been given to live in on situations you've already lived? Or wasting it on situations that you're going to end up living twice by worrying about them? I don't think so.
Of course, I'm an advocate of reflecting on the past to gain experience for the future. And an advocate of preflecting on the future to make the proper decisions in the present. But as I have mentioned before, acknowledge your mistakes of the past, and grasp the lesson. Acknowledge the consequences of the future, and grasp the decision. Then live your life with that information right now.
Dr. Emmett Brown from Back To The Future III said it best, when he said "I wish I'd never invented that infernal time machine. It's caused nothing but disaster." If you go back in time to fix one mistake, you risk making another in your present by not paying attention. If you go forward in time to prevent a mistake, you risk making another in your present as well.
In H.G. Wells' book "Time Machine" the inventor of the time machine tries to go back in time to save his fiance from death. But every time he prevents one manifestation of the disaster, the same result is decided via a different avenue. He may prevent her from being shot by a robber, but she gets run over by a carriage.
So my point: go with the flow of time. You're going to screw up in the past, in the future, and hell, even right now. Mistakes are going to be made no matter when you make them or how. If not by one event, then by another - because there is a lesson you must learn, and you will experience it. So when it happens, take note, and move on. Eventually your time will run out, and what will you have to show for it if you've spent all your time traveling, and never actually lived?
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