If You Could Go Back

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TheWryWren

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If you could go back in your life and change anything (an important decision, a bad mistake, etc…) what would you change?

Go into as much or little detail as you’d like!
 
I’d probably make a little more time for doing things outside of my daily obligations.
I spent a lot of time studying and sleeping and doing nothing else. The monotony and stress of it really got to me sometimes.
Hanging out with friends and acquaintances and just… doing something fun, like watching a movie or going out to eat is something I hope to do more often going forward with my life.
 
The decision to ever begin playing games or consuming entertainment media in general. So much time lost and so little gained. Literally thousands of hours on a steam account before I deleted it, and for what? Nothing. Gotta workaholic to compensate now
 
The only regret I have is not becoming catholic earlier. But I don’t know if I could have changed that without the insight to know that a nun gave me misleading information about what Catholicism was. I guess if I could, I’d encourage myself to seek the answer to my question in a second and better resource, instead of assuming the nun was representing the Church’s position accurately?

The other things I’d change, I honestly think would have been different if I’d been told the truth about Catholicism. (I and my lost-ness were the common denominator in my problems). So becoming catholic sooner would still be my answer.
 
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Nothing. I would not be the person I am today if I had not made the mistakes I made earlier in my life. This is not to say that I’m totally satisfied with who I’ve become, but changing things about my past doesn’t guarantee that I would be.
 
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UpUpAndAway said:
Nothing. I would not be the person I am today if I had not made the mistakes I made earlier in my life.
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Yeah, I’d like to say I wouldn’t commit all the bad sins I did before the Lord.
But I’d be a totally different person and my life would have been a very different life.
Perhaps it was necessary to go through some of that to learn and become closer to the Lord? Who knows. I don’t think about it.
 
In learning what I should and should not do in order to live a good life, error has been an important teacher.
 
It would be easy to say I wouldn’t have married my ex wife knowing how it would end, but we created a great son, so I don’t regret that. The financial hardships led to learning how to manage money. Bad personal relationships led to finding my wonderful wife. I am what all of my experiences made me, and I’m happy, my wife is happy, our kids and grandkids love us. We’re able to help parents, kids and siblings. I fell in love with the Catholic Faith and am at peace. There is hope for my salvation.
 
I would have taken a gap year beaten high school and college to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. It probably would have saved me a lot of money and some time. I was always too busy during school to explore my options and reflect on what I wanted to do.
 
I would show more love to those in my life who loved me, more kindness and appreciation, and I would try to be less selfish. I was a really selfish kid, having been the first born, but on the flip side, I got less freedom than my younger siblings, had to fight harder for what I wanted, and was treated less fairly. So, maybe that accounted for some of it. I also had an inferiority complex and felt I always had to prove something. Now, I realize I don’t need to prove anything to anyone, so that was a lot of wasted time and effort.

I would also manage my finances more wisely, and wouldn’t drink like I did throughout the entire decade of my twenties. Beer, mainly – the darker the better, as per the German in my genes. It was a miracle that I never got a DUI.

Oh yes, this gal has a past!
 
Learn to play a musical instrument or two (piano, recorder).

Learn a foreign language or three (Spanish, German, Russian).

Brush and floss my teeth regularly. I’m paying for this now!

Keep in touch with old friends. Don’t let them slip away.
 
This is exactly what I was going to say. Well, not exactly. We are who we are because of the choices we make. Plus, Our Lord tells us to live in the present like little children. No sense in doing anything else.
 
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Nothing, i’ve being through some stuff but i dont think i would be the same if it wasnt for those things, its tempting to go back and yell at my 14 year old me but that would mess my timeline up or something.
 
I also do not waste much time dwelling on regrets or what-ifs. I do believe that everything in our lives happens for a reason, even if we can’t make sense of those reasons now.

What if I’d found a way to save my marriage all those years ago? One thing’s for sure, the four kids my ex had with her current husband wouldn’t be here now. So good came out of something which did not seem good at the time.

What if I’d stayed in school instead of becoming an electrician? I touched a lot of lives, hopefully for good, during my years in the building trades, and a lot of good people helped me too. My life would have been different, but not necessarily better.

What if I hadn’t chosen early retirement after the great (awful) recession of 2008? I certainly would not have been able to devote so much time to helping my elderly mother as I do now.

So everything in life happens for a reason, and God can truly make good out of any situation…
 
Beryllos said:
Brush and floss my teeth regularly. I’m paying for this now!
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But you’re helping to financially support your dentist now, which is a good thing, I guess… After I neglected my dental health in my 20s and had a bridge and a crown installed, I told my dentist he should name his yacht after me 😁.
 
The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it
 
I made some very important mistakes at a concrete moment in my life that actually changed what my life would have been. But thanks to these mistakes… I’m where I am now, and I like where I am. I think I had a civil vocation, and I managed to start studying for it. But I got completely distracted on my first year of college, slacked off as I never had done and had to study for a different thing.

Thank God, it turned to be a very beautiful job. And it has let me spend much more time with my close relatives since I can live in my city and work with some of them.

So… for the good and for the bad, I wouldn’t change anything.
 
Would have put a little more effort into my college studies, so that I could have finished with a GPA above 2.5. That would have given me at least a chance to go to graduate school.

That said, I can’t complain about how things turned out. 25 years all with the same employer, and still going. Not many people can say that.
 
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