Doing Life Over

I watched a video featuring Jordan Peterson in which he mentioned an intriguing question he had once asked his parents. “If you could go back to when you were 18 and know everything you know now, would you want to?”

Initially, I thought I had already struggled to make the correct choice even when facing a similar situation a second time, yet that question kept lingering in my thoughts. Many of us have made choices that did not turn out as we hoped, leaving us wishing we had taken another path. There have been movies that present this concept or where a person keeps reliving the same day over and over again.

A person whose life is not going well would like to have a chance to go back and make a different decision; however, they should not let past decisions be the same going forward. Many books have been written on this issue.

Many of us realize in hindsight that we would have made different choices if we had known what we later learned. That exercise can be like pulling that string hanging from a sweater; after a few minutes, the sweater has changed a lot more than you expected. When I was 18, I gave a female classmate a ride home from the Senior Picnic and did not stop and talk with my girlfriend when I saw her while the girl was alone with me in my car. That prompted a discussion about trust and led to the end of that relationship.

If I had the benefit of knowing then what I know now, would I have made a better choice, and if so, how would that affect the rest of my life? I think we would have recognized later, without that discussion, that Pat and I were not meant to be life soulmates, but part of our search for who we would become. If we could remove all the painful periods, would we also have eliminated those special periods where our love grew the most?

What periods in our lives do we spend the most time in prayer? For me, it is those involving pain and suffering. My life is a sum of all that I have experienced, including both good and bad decisions. I certainly will not say I am proud of all of them, but I do feel I have been blessed more than I deserved. If you always knew the correct answers for every test, how long would it take before you stopped studying for tests? How would that affect the way you approached life in general? How often can you tell your 18-year-old grandchild the correct decision in their life? You can share your experiences; however, they will live with their choices.