We have all hear the phrase or
said “I wish I could turn back the hands of time.” Have you ever thought how
this could be done with a digital clock?
We no longer can turn back hands.
We now must press buttons. Thus,
progress and time marches on and on and on. However, what if we could get progress to
march backwards? What if we could turn back the hands of time? Imagine all the events that it would be
possible to alter. Would we be smart
enough to prevent disasters? For
instance, what if we could go back to the beginning of WW II? Would we be able to find a way to stop Hitler
and the Holocaust? What if we could go
back to the assassination of Julius Caesar? Could we grab him by the toga and warn him that his best friend was
going to kill him? Do you think he would
believe you? If there were a way to turn
the clock back, who would have the power to do so? Can you imagine everyone running back into
history to change things? Who would
decide what to change?
But let us imagine just for today,
that you had the power to turn your own clock back. Just for today, imagine if you could change your history. What time would you turn it back to? Where would you turn it back to? Then what would you do? What would you use your power to change or do
differently? Would you try to save the
world or simply undo some stupid things that you personally did?
Sadly, we all seem to forget that
while we can not take back any actions or words that hurt others in the past,
we can make amends for them today. What if you made a list of things that you
would like to change in the past and started today to make amends for those
things? Could you pick one thing you
would like to make amends for each week and work on it? How would you feel? How would this change your life? You really do control your own destiny and
perhaps can turn back the hands or as least digits of time. It is never too late to change things if you start today.
I wouldn't say that my life has been perfect, but I wouldn't change a thing. That may sound smug, but I don't think it is. The crucial question for me is: how interconnected are events? If we live in a loosely connected universe, then I could change a few things and leave everything else unchanged. In a tightly interconnected universe, if I change one thing, everything else will become different as well, in ways that it is impossible to predict. It seems clear that, taken in isolation, changing some of the things I have done would make certain isolated things better. But the problem is that I doubt that things happen in sufficient isolation. I'm not sure that there is any empirical way to find out how tight or loose things are. I see myself as something of a risk taker, but in this thought experiment I imagine myself reacting quite cautiously. I'm not sure why.
ReplyDeleteGood points Bruce, I am going to a men's group discussion tomorrow on this very subject. I have difficulty finding things I would change but I was thinking more of people I have hurt and what amends I could make to them. It is even difficult to do that since things and people are now different and long gone. I think the decisions I have made, while not always for the best, where the only ones I could have made at the time, given who I was and my own personality. Don't know how that could have been different.
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