TreeHouseView

That age old question of If You Could, Would You poses so many delicious answers, doesn’t it? The devil is in all of the details because it’s never going to be so simple and about just that one moment in time when you start to really break it down. Collateral damage and all that comes with it, yeah?

But oh my, the way it’s tempting to consider having the option to have a legit Do Over for something in your life that either you screwed up yourself and thus the outcome was not what you had hoped for, or for something that was screwed up FOR you due to circumstances beyond your control. A chance to hop back in the saddle and take back the reins and control of that horse that took it’s head on your first rodeo but this time around you’re going to keep those reins in hand and guide that horse where you want it go. Silly human.

And therein lies the rub…that control piece. Oh, how we yearn for it even when we don’t recognize that’s what is going on until after the fact, because isn’t that what a Do Over really is? A mechanism of control to change something in your life that didn’t work out like you foresaw. But even if we go back and change what we think we want to–we alter that moment that will forever morph the outcome and therefor the trajectory of the rest of our life. And then what?

How many other things will be different because of that? What kind of terrible Butterfly Effect will be enacted because of this? Say I go back to my college days and reverse the break-up with my college boyfriend because he was supposed to be The One. From there we would need to draw an infinite flow chart of how that will inpact every single relationship that each of us made from that point in time until this current point in time and how each of those relationships is then impacted due to that, and so on and so forth. It’s never-ending. There’s not enough poster board or white board space for any of that nonsense!

So it’s never so simple. it’s the Sliding Doors principle–that Gwyneth Paltrow movie that depicts two different storylines showing how her life could differ depending on whether or not she catches a train. It demonstrates the principle of how things can change drastically in your life with seemingly small, almost imperceptible moments like a sliding door closing on a train and either you catch the train that you need to or you don’t. That little moment could make a world of difference in how the arc of your life is impacted.

If you drive a car, you’ve probably had a near miss where you’ve considered how just a few minutes or more likely just literal seconds of change in your routine could have made all the difference in the way things turned out. It is mind-bending when I think about these things too much. If people had the actual option to go back in time and enact actual Do-Overs, how many of these Sliding Door moments for others would wind up coming out different? The philosophical and probably eithical maybe moral aspect of this is so deep I can’t even fathom it so instead I’ll make terrible literary and literal puns about it.

Would I go back if I was given the option? I’m not going to say no, because I’m not above temptation, that’s for damn sure. But it would depend heavily on what the moment is/was/will be and that decision would be so much more than just what it appears on the surface…or at least it should be.