Pondering

I find myself unable to stop my thoughts from considering moving about in Time, living a life where the concepts of cause and effect have different meanings than for the most of us. It's hard to make sense of it, not having experienced it myself.

I think the immediate reaction is to travel through your life and try to tinker with it, improve your life, like go back and give a younger you stock tips so that you could live a more comfortable life. I'm sure there are things that I could improve with but a little work but I can't think of anything that needs changing.

Some things would be obvious. For instance, had my parents been gunned down by criminals when I was a youth and I had the ability to stop that from happening, well, I'd tend to think that I'd want to fix that. It opens up all sorts of headaches about paradoxes and would totally change who you were as a more adult person but that's a big scale personal injustice. It's the sort of thing that a person can point to and say 'This wrecked my life'.

I don't know that I have any of those injustices. Which is nice.

It's not that I've not experienced tragedy or sadness in my life as I certainly have done. It's just that I don't know that they are fixable or that I want them to be fixed. If I went back and got my grandpa to stop smoking cigars, would he still be alive? By this point, probably not. I don't believe he or anyone else is fated to die at a specific time, that someone's 'number' just 'comes up', but I like to think that I'm humble enough to realize that my brain's not large enough to process all the variables involved. Maybe if he stopped smoking cigars, he'd get hit by a car during a time when, originally, he was buying a box of smokes in a store. Maybe he would have drank more alcohol and gotten liver problems. Maybe it wasn't the cigars that did him in. Who is to say that I know best?

As far as Heather leaving me? As rough as that was to experience, maybe it was a good thing in the long run. Maybe we would have made a miserable married couple. Maybe she'd still be dead. Maybe not. Again, I don't know. Maybe she'd be alive and I'd wish she was dead. Or I was dead. That would be horrible. Maybe we should have gotten married while we were in college instead of planning for it as a post college event. Perhaps we would have worked as a team to get through it instead of thinking it would be a distraction or that we could do it 'properly' once we were graduated and employed.

I don't know. I don't know that anybody knows.