I Wish Things Were Different

We hear it all the time. Most often in reference to the past. Someone is lamenting about their current situation, and those five words end a thought. Almost always, a beat of silence comes next. You can feel them wistfully reminisce, mourning a different life in those quiet moments. Then it’s gone. They dive back in to all the things wrong and inconvenient about right now.

Maybe you do wish things, or at least something, was different. Some past moment that you wish could have ended different than it did. I think we all do at various points in our lives. I think it’s part of being human. But how often do you dwell on it? How often do you let yourself imagine how much happier or skinnier or more successful you’d be if you’d just done x, y, or z?

The thing about the past is that it’s just that: passed. It’s already done, and no matter how hard you wish, you still can’t change it. The past is the path you’ve already followed, and it is what it is. It’s the circumstances the world has already laid down for you to deal with. And you dealt with it, or you are dealing with it now. But the past is the map of your journey that’s already been written. There is no changing what’s already on the paper.

There is one thing you can change though, and that’s how you remember it. Every piece of our life experience is intertwined with every other experience we’ve ever had. It’s like water finding its way down a path. Rock here, divot there. But water will always find a way to flow, even if the obstacles deserve credit for shaping the route. So if that one thing really was different? Maybe everything else good that happened after that moment would be different too.

I don’t know that anything good comes from wishing the past was different. Wishing doesn’t change a single thing about what’s right now. I just know that staring too long at what we don’t like makes it a whole lot harder to notice anything we do like though. And if we spent too much time dreaming of a life that isn’t ours? I think that makes it hard to enjoy anything, maybe even everything, right in front of us.

If I had made that first premier soccer team I tried out for when I was little? Maybe I would have  played soccer longer. But maybe I’d never have found out about running. Or if I got a different scholarship and went to a different college? Who knows where I’d be. But everything would absolutely be different. Any myriad of what ifs, even the biggest ones, bring me right back to the exact same spot. Acknowledging that without all of it, the good might not be here either.

We are who we are because of all of it. The good moments and the bad, the unexpected things and the mundane. Stopping to buy a coffee on a Tuesday twelves years ago could’ve been the thing that changed our path completely, whether we know it or not. The world will always be full of wishes and what ifs, and it’s not a bad lens to look through. It just works better when you are looking ahead instead of behind.

The past is permanent. We can’t erase what’s already been. And if there are things about it, or our present, that we wish could be different, well, we need to acknowledge that we can’t change where we’ve been. But we can change where we’re going. We can pick up those what ifs and why nots and our wishes, and we can use them to forge ahead. We can use them to guide us down our next path.

Maybe in this moment you wish you were healthier. Well, you can’t make yourself healthier yesterday. But you can make healthier choices today, and tomorrow. You can make yourself a healthier future. And one day you can look back on this moment and remember how, beginning today, you used something you weren’t proud of to positively shape your future. You looked ahead and made a first good choice that led to many others.

The hand life has dealt us is the hand that life has dealt us. The choices we’ve made are the choices we’ve already made. It all is what it is, and it’s brought you to right here. A different past is impossible. It’s up to you to decide how that shapes you. But a different future is a choice. Life moves forward no matter which direction you’re looking. You’ll just be better prepared for what’s next if you spend your time looking ahead.