Would You Change the Past?

Mara here:

It's the end of the year and I'm feeling contemplative. I'm reflecting on the past year, which usually leads to thinking about the whole of my life, weighing the ups and the downs.

When I was younger, I would often re-imagine scenarios, creating more positive outcomes and thinking about how wonderful my life could have been. But as I get older and I am able to understand the interconnectedness of everything, I no longer wish I could change the past.

Trust me, this doesn't mean I'm happy about how everything turns out. I have many disappointments. I have many struggles with momentarily wishing things had had a different outcome. But overall, when I look at my life, I'm happy with how things are.

I recently read Stephen King's book 11/22/63. It's about time travel. It ponders the question of whether or not changing the past is a good thing or not. In the book, it specifically focuses on the assassination of President Kennedy. If you could stop President Kennedy from dying in 1963, would you?

On the face of it, it seems obvious to want to change things that were bad or are painful to remember. Wouldn't you want to stop the untimely death of a friend or loved one if you could? Wouldn't you avoid World War II if you could do something to stop it?

For most of us, our instinct would be to step in and try to fix things that are remembered as "bad."

But we can't really know what the ripple effect of changing one thing in the past would be. Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect both discuss how everything that happens is dependent on everything else. The classic metaphor is how a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the would can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world—cause and effect. If you kill the butterfly, what events are you subsequently changing? If the hurricane doesn't happen, you might keep your house from flooding, but then maybe a tree that would have been uprooted in the wind of the storm instead falls on someone's car causing deaths?

It's kind of mind boggling to fall into the wormhole of what-ifs.

My first introduction to the idea of the Butterfly Effect was actually the movie Back to the Future. In the movie, the character Marty, played by Michael J. Fox, goes back in time and does the younger incarnation of his father a favor. That favor changes the course of his parents' lives to the point where they don't ever get married, which means he isn't born—in the future. He starts to disappear. To nine-year-old me, the concept of causing damage to your future self, from the past, was disturbing. And it turned me off to the idea of time travel.

I didn't want to mess around with time.

And I still feel that way. I have the luxury to feel that way. I've had a pretty nice life. And when I look at the people in my life, including my parents who adopted me, I can't imagine doing anything that would land me in different circumstances.

Did I get abandoned by my birth family when I was two? Yes. Did I get to go to Yale? No. Did I book the role in Rent on Broadway after making it to the fourth callback? No. Did that feel crushing at the time? Yes.

But would I go back and change the outcome? I wouldn't. Because if I hadn't been abandoned, I wouldn't have been adopted. If I had attended Yale, I would never have met my husband Brad, who I met at UC Davis. If I had booked Rent, would we have ended up with our amazing daughter? Probably not. I'm not saying we wouldn't have had kids, but it likely wouldn't have been, Malia.

Timing matters. Do I know things would be worse if they were different? No. Can I imagine a world without my family as it is now? No.

There are a few things that I know, for a fact, have completely altered the course of my life: my adoption, meeting my husband, and the birth of our daughter. And I can't imagine anything that would be worth risking those things.

By the way, I enjoyed 11/22/63. If you enjoy Stephen King books, you might want to check it out. It's definitely food for thought.

Here are some questions I asked my mom about this.

I think that not having a wish to change the past, has freed me from living a life feeling regretful. Do you have regrets?

Mara, I do what you do. Every time I feel regretful about something in the past, I think about the wonderful things that came about because of that very thing I'm regretting, whether it's not going to an ivy league college, or whether it's the most painful regret I still feel in my life: the death of my sweet father when I was ten. When that regret arises, I let myself feel sad but then I reflect on how, had he lived, my family would have had the money to send me to that ivy league school and I'd have never met your Dad.

And yet, I can still cry over losing my Dad. I cried last week on December 7th, the anniversary of his death. I still wish he hadn't died so young...and when I was so young. At the same time, I wouldn't have wanted my life to take any different path than it has because then I wouldn't have met your Dad...and wouldn't have adopted you. 

I reconcile these seemingly contradictory feelings with a wonderful line from Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contract myself. I am large; I contain multitudes."

Are there Buddhist teachings that can help with feelings of regret?

There are. One that comes to mind is the Buddha's teachings in the first noble truth about the realities of the human condition—how all of us are going to face unwanted losses in life, whether it's not getting a job we want or whether it's the most devastating loss—that of someone we love dearly. When we're able to accept that not having things go as we wanted and that losses are a natural part of the life cycle and that we don't control when losses will happen, we can begin to make peace with the past. Then we can turn our attention to the present...to our life right now...rather than living in regret about the past.

I'm sure you remember Martha Dickman who was a music teacher in Davis when you were young. I'm working on a second edition of How to Be Sick and I'm including a quotation from her that was in her obituary when she died about two years ago: "The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift." Nice words to live by I thought, and that's why I added them to the book.

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So what about you? Would you go back and change the past if you could? Are there events in your life that you can think of that felt bad at the time they happened, but that with reflection turned out to be positive?