What If You Aren't The Only One That Wants You To Go Back In Time

What if, is perhaps, the most thought-provoking question anyone can ask. It is the springboard thought of all great questions. How many great books, movies, and television shows started with what if? How many discoveries, advancements, and achievements began with people asking, what if?

The other most thought-provoking question ever asked is likely the question of the time machine. It is a simple question. In the movie Dark Blue, we see Kurt Russell in the middle of a shooting inquiry. A member of the police commission has one final question, the time machine question.

Have you ever asked yourself what if you could go back in time and change something? More than likely, the answer is yes. Have you ever been told by someone else that if they could go back in time and do something differently, something that affected your life, they would? What if that would have kept you from untold, undreamt suffering you went through because of their “decision?”

Give the devil his due. Perhaps nothing is as torturous as facing the possibility that something could have been different. We all have a limited time in this life. We want to spend our time happily and at peace. That is the dream.

Paying Someone Else’s Tab

People should be mindful of their decisions. Of course, not all decisions will be good ones. We stumble, we fall, and we have to pick ourselves back up. What if the decisions that affected our lives the most weren’t ours? How would that affect a person’s wellness, long-term happiness, and mental health?

Life can be very much like a card dealer that’s cheating. Everybody plays the cards they are dealt. That’s how life works. However, when you’re being dealt a hand because of things out of your control, you’re playing a blind hand. You’ll also be paying a price, a price decided by someone else and without your knowledge.

Different events in time will take you to different places, like off ramps of a freeway, your destination may be delayed, or forever changed by moving off the original line. Imagine the roads at the top being your timeline, and someone else takes over the wheel, putting you on an alternate path.

It’s a horrible idea that someone else could put you on a different path, especially if the original path would have taken you somewhere far better, somewhere you wanted to go, and instead your new path wound you up in hell.

“If I could, I’d go back and undo what I did to you two.”

— S.R.

Facing that reality, knowing that it could have been different, would leave a person feeling like they were robbed of what could have been. It forces a person to realize that at different points, their lives weren’t their own. People take the fate of others into their hands when they act arbitrarily or capriciously.

It’s a haunting thought. To never be haunted by the past is a gift some people receive. People with less complicated lives, or one would assume. To be haunted by the power of decisions that were taken away, or a fate that was not of your choosing may be the equivalent of hell.

It works on both sides of the coin. While one side faces the knowledge of what could have been and has to face the questions of self-doubt, wondering if they fought hard enough, if they could have made a difference sooner, the other person may have their own demons from their decisions.

“From everything I hear if I’d let things be or looked for a compromise before busting you kids up…she wouldn’t have suffered all these years as a punching bag.”

What’s worse, knowing that what could have been was robbed from you? Or is it worse knowing that someone you knew loved you more than anything wound up in their own kind of hell, and it wasn’t their choice either?

Thoughts On The Time Machine

It’s fun to think about going back and playing the right numbers on the Powerball, getting to see real dinosaurs or even solving the mystery of Roswell New Mexico. If a decision someone forces upon you sends you down a timeline that includes a trip through a hellscape and dooms you to an existence you didn’t want, revisiting those facts will do nothing but haunt you. That discussion was 12 years ago.

Be mindful of what you do today because you may force someone down a path you’ll regret later, and have to live with knowing what you did forever changed the course of all parties concerned for the worse. Talk to people before acting, never act rashly, never act out of emotion, and think things through. The problems you see today may be ones you created, and aren’t aware of how. Tomorrow’s problems don’t have to be on your conscience as well.