time travel.

The year ends, as it always does, leaving me wishing I could travel back in time and do a hell of a lot of things differently.

As the clock strikes midnight I’ll inevitably look around and wonder how I got there, at the end of an entire year of my life seemingly empty handed. When did that happen (and more importantly - why haven’t we yet mastered a time machine?). I guess that’s just how fast it all happens - seconds, a moment, a word, a choice, a glance, a feeling - that’s how life happens, quickly, and most of the time without my even realizing it.

Life and the years of our lives happen as fast and fleetingly as it takes to count to ten, and I’d like to go back in those countdown seconds and warn my previous countdown self to the dangers looming in the distance of the upcoming year. I would have resolved then and there to proceed with extreme caution: warning, injuries and mistakes are closer than they appear. It would make a difference, wouldn’t it, to be able to go back right before you’re forced to go forward? Go back with clarity and distance and knowledge and collect what evidence you can on the inner-workings of your downfalls so you can stop yourself (for God’s sake) from making the same mistakes (again and again and again).

Because the answer isn’t to stop caring or to start caring about something like quitting smoking or losing weight or signing up for speed dating. No, we can resolve all we want to (and who are we kidding, really? Well, ourselves, always), but who we deep-down-are isn’t going to change no matter what promises we make for ourselves. All we can do is try to go back and in those ten seconds attempt to see ourselves in the harsh light of the year gone by. Shine the spotlight on those pivotal seconds and defining moments, those nasty words and foolish choices, those lost glances and forgotten aching feelings and continue to let life happen (quickly) but this time realize it.

And if you’re like me you’ll want to cling desperately to what little you got right (ok, so maybe my hands aren’t entirely empty...), and in those ten seconds you’ll vow to make every attempt to know better what you’re doing so you can do it all differently with your eyes more open (and your heart a bit more closed), so that maybe next year, if you can at all help it, you won’t have so many regrets.

Because until we can actually travel backward (and it’s only a matter of time, really) and allow the chance for history to diverge from our original past, we are stuck on a linear path moving forward into complete and total uncertainty which is both thrilling and terrifying at the exact same time.

Cause for celebration? Well, I guess.