Time

Have you ever wondered if you lived your life over whether your life now would be any different? I have considered that question in a thought experiment.

My conclusion is that one’s life would be exactly the same.

Why? Often, when you consider going back in time, you forget that whatever you know now, you wouldn’t know then. You would be in exactly the same place with the same thoughts and the same feelings and considerations. Nothing would be any different. In addition, if you knew then what you know now, you would technically be living a different life—not the one you lived.

Strangely, the only way your life could change from the path you took would be if someone else did something different. If the past environment changed, then you would respond differently, and our future (along with everybody else’s) would go in a different direction. Since nobody else can change either, the past you lived cannot be altered, only reinterpreted by you in your present.

What if some evil time-travel assassin from the present goes back and kills your parents? Would you disappear? No, because your past (the one in which you were born) already happened, so it would not alter you in any way. Now, if you, yourself, went back in time to 1968, your past would not alter either, but your present—your now—would simply be in 1968. Yes, you would be able to meet yourself because that other you is not you. Why? Because they didn’t have your past, how could they be you? Does that make sense?

One other point. Lewis Carroll wrote,

“It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

It is all too easy to forget who we were even only a few years ago, let alone when we were ten. Think about all those things we sweep under the carpet when we contemplate the past. The boredom, the irritation, the ignorance, the pain, and the frustrations of those prior times are easily glossed over and forgotten. But why worry about the past anyway? The great thing about living through something is that one never has to experience it again.

What? You still feel frustrated, bored, irritated, and ignorant like you did in the past? The capacity to feel doesn’t change as we grow older, but how we live with those feelings does. As we age, we get better at their management. Besides, if we took a deep breath, gathered some patience, and looked at the world with fresh eyes, the future and the present might look different, and we wouldn’t have to think about reliving what we already lived.

The past is fixed, the present is here, and the future … I suppose it will just have to wait.