If You Could Do It Over Again

I’ve never understood the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game. The premise is that we’ve all made mistakes or done ill-advised things over the course of our lives, and if we could go back in time, which of those embarrassments would we retract? Yes, all of us have made bad decisions or acted in ways we’ve later regretted. What if I would have married that girl I was seriously dating when I was 18 (who wanted to marry me)? What if I would have continued my meager music career instead of going to college? What if I would have majored in Biology instead of English? What if I had gone to law school instead of grad school in theater? What if I wouldn’t have married my first wife? What if my first wife and I hadn’t divorced? What if I would have followed my mentor to Yale instead of staying at Iowa? What if I would have stayed on in business instead of going into teaching? And on and on and on. There are so many decisions and actions we make along the way that shape and direct our lives, some of them obviously of import at the time, most of them seemingly minor. But the fallacy of the “If You Could Do It Over Again” game is that every decision and every act that you make along the way contributes to the way it all turns out. If you pull out any one thread, the whole fabric unravels. Perhaps if you’re a mass murderer, you might be able to play the game in a way to see how things might have turned out in a more positive way (unless you were satisfied with the mass murderer’s life). But if you’re like most people who reach relatively middle or older age in a relatively comfortable manner, there’s no way of knowing how deleting an earlier (seeming) misstep might have altered your trajectory. We are who we are by all of the decisions we make, good or ill, and – perhaps more important – by all the accidents and flukes that come along by chance. We are in the end not arrows, shot straight on a line from bow to a target, but more billiard balls, careening off railings and bumpers and one another and falling somehow, eventually, hopefully, into a pocket.