Time Travel

If you could go back in time, would you change things? You would, of course you would. If you look at your life and think, wow, I wouldn't change a thing, not even the one teeny tiny bit of rearranging, I'd like to come shake your hand. And then slap you a little bit, just you know, so you'd have something different to say the next time.

What do you reckon you'd change, really? To find that one moment that set the ball rolling for the way a life shapes up. Kind of a challenge. I think I'd go through several attempts, seeing the sometimes misplaced sense of priorities I seem to persistently exhibit. Like in some movies, where the protagonist goes through a day again and again to get it exactly right, and in the end, someone dies anyway, because the moron was fixing the wrong moment.

Or maybe it's destiny and no matter how many times you adjust things, you're going to land up exactly where you were supposed to.

There's a film that sort of is about this and then some. Have you watched Sliding Doors? The movie starts with Gwyneth Paltrow having lost her job at a PR firm. She has a few drinks with her friends, goes home to a boyfriend who you realise is a bit of an ass right away. The next morning, she's running to make it in time for the train, and this is the moment the film splits into two. Two parallel tracks: one in which she makes it in time, chats with this lovely man, comes back home in time to find her boyfriend cheating on her, moves out, etc. And the other track, where she misses the train, the doors slide shut, and on her way back home, she gets mugged, goes to the hospital, remains oblivious to her cheating boyfriend for a large chunk of the movie, etc etc.

Now here's the thing. In both sequences, she ends up meeting the same people in different ways. And in one scenario, she dies in the end. And in the other one, she ends up talking to lovely man from the train much later, in the end. In an elevator.

It all depended on whether on not she caught the train in time. Scary stuff.

I watched three things about this in quick consequence, hence all this thought.

A rerun of an episode in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. where they all asked what if? What if Phoebe were a corporate lawyer, what if Monica was still fat, what if Chandler quit and became a cartoonist, etc.
The thing is, at the end of the show, they all were exactly where they would have otherwise been.

Last night, I watched an episode of Supernatural (who else wants to have Dean's babies? :)) which finally showed a scenario that the boys continue to ask in each episode. What if we'd never been ghost hunters, demon killers, vampire stakes, etc etc. They show Dean in a cool corporate job, madly rich and successful and Sam, tech support in the same company. And of course, they end up seeing a ghost and fight it, and maybe 5 years later than otherwise, they joined hands and became... well hunters. Hot hunters. Fully awesome, demon-killing, good looking, funny... okay. Back to the point.

I am a deeply impulsive being, which means I go through most things in life with the attitude of an elephant crashing through a jungle, not really thinking about how what I do or don't is shaping tomorrow. It's much later, when I reflect, I can see what I probably should have done differently. But then, what I didn't do differently also made me what I am today, yes? And if I do like that bit, then the rest becomes pointless.We're possibly meant to be just this. What we are today. Maybe when my father died, a part of me became so strong that it can take on the world. Maybe, the graveyard of my dead relationships made me so focused towards work that I soared professionally. Maybe, the hurt and the pain that every disappointment brought gave me newer stories to write. Without those, who would I have been today? Someone better? Happier? Maybe. With better stories? Unlikely, but who's to say?

What then, do I go back to change?

So, maybe some battle scars are there for a reason. Even if the reason is just to make you feel like a giant dufus.