Time travel is a dangerous piece of business.
I have argued that the greatest superpower — without question — would be the ability to travel in time.
That said, I have also argued that I would prefer to limit this power to future time travel only:
Allow me to see the disasters looming ahead and perhaps prevent them, rather than traveling back in time and potentially unraveling everything that has already happened.
With that in mind, I thought about my own past.
I am supremely happy with where I am today and would never risk my family or my children’s existence to change something in the past, but if I could go back in time and change something, I wonder what I might change without risking my present state of being.
So I made a list. It’s short because large-scale changes could alter my entire future, even though I’d love to change some of those, too.
For example, I would love to avoid being arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit, and I’d love to erase the armed robbery and violence that have led to a lifetime of post-traumatic stress disorder, but those experiences helped me to land where I am today.
In some ways, I am thankful to both of those hardships for who they helped me become.
So I’ve had to be careful and choose only those moments worth changing, without altering the course of my life to any great degree.
Keeping these parameters in mind, here is my list of things I would change in my past if given the opportunity that I think would preserve my present situation, too:
- Complete my Eagle Scout service project earlier — before a near-fatal car accident interfered with my dream of becoming an Eagle Scout.
- Listen to audiobooks sooner rather than thinking of them as “not real reading.”
- Don’t turn down that possible threesome opportunity when I was 19 years old.
- Start playing golf by taking actual lessons rather than the advice from friends who clearly didn’t have my best interests at heart.
- Visit my mother more often before her death.
- Visit with Laura — my high school girlfriend — more often before her death.
- Complete my Master’s program slowly and efficiently rather than quickly and expensively.
- Attend my grandfather’s funeral.
- Increase the cost of my DJ services much sooner in my company’s career.
- Increase my consulting fees much earlier in my career.
- Don’t call Pirate — one of our childhood dogs — back across the street and into the path of a speeding car while waiting to be picked up for Sunday school.
- Make that investment in Citigroup in 2009 when the stock was under $1, which I talked about constantly at the time, but failed to execute.
- Don’t speak aloud about the Smith College china set that I managed to convince a factory to produce after five years of efforts to surprise Elysha on Christmas Day, only to ruin the surprise when she overheard me telling a client about the gift and the extraordinary efforts I had made to have a set produced.
- Attempt to stay more closely connected to a small handful of friends who have drifted from my life over the years.
