Fix Your Past Mistakes, or Get a Million Dollars?

(re-run)

A Facebook post asks if you’d rather go back in time and fix all of your mistakes or don’t do that and get $1,000,000 instead. That’s easy. People will take the money.

What if the choice were, go back in time and fix all your mistakes or don’t (no money)? I’d say no to going back and here’s why:

Every little decision I’ve made throughout my life, right or wrong, got me to where I am today. I rather like where I am, and I know that one decision can set one’s life on a different trajectory. I have good relatives, appreciative (most of the time) grown children, a nice life and enough money — enough to stay in the one of the most expensive states in the U.S.A.

Any one decision might have changed my life so that:

I wouldn’t have three kids, or at least the same three kids.
I wouldn’t have a successful career as a children’s book author.
I wouldn’t have a beach house.
I wouldn’t belong to a large chorus with great people.
I wouldn’t have a bunch of girlfriends (only two of them sent Christmas cards, but oh, well).

Yes, I’d give up my health issues, but then I’d probably have different and maybe worse ones.

I’d give up my crazy pets, but then how would I be entertained daily by their antics?

I’d give up the headache of homeownership, but there’s a lot of security to having a home.

I might’ve wanted to live in the pioneer days, but then I would’ve lost children to diseases and my husband (or I) would be dead at 40.

I might’ve wanted to be born into the future, but the movie The Martian was depressing as heck. I don’t want to live on a planet where I can’t go outside and where I have to grow potatoes in my own poop. Talk about lonely and depressing — killer winds, no green life, definitely nowhere to go dancing.

I’d trade in my life for one with a happy marriage, but again, different children and maybe none of 1 through 5 (see above).

I guess I’ll keep what I have, keep on living my retired life and hope for the best.

A longtime teacher friend on Facebook complained that she has to have her ten-year colonoscopy this week. I have to go every two years (go — no pun intended). I won’t even trade that in, though I’d love to never have another colonoscopy, ever. I’d do 20 mammograms a year instead if I could. Or a root canal. Or pick up other people’s dog poop.

But I digress.

Those posts on Facebook are thought provoking, if nothing else. Right now, I love seeing the weather in different parts of the country, seeing brave friends on Caribbean cruises, and seeing other friends skiing in Tahoe. I sit in my warm little house with 60 degrees outside and occasional sunshine and think, it’s all good.

Even that danged colonoscopy.