Frankly, I’m a bit sad that there’s a visible movement away from blogging and reading blogs to keep in touch with faraway or time-challenged friendships. I know that everyone’s more in touch than ever what with text messaging, instant messaging, twittering and social network sites. But that’s just a one-liner here and there, with maybe a few photos. It’s engaging, quick and convenient, but it doesn’t really allow one to lay out one’s mind, revealing thoughts and concepts like the old cliche of laying cards out on the table. I like the records I keep by blogging about things in my life or musing about thoughts I’ve had.

The other night, Mr. W and I watched “The Butterfly Effect” at home. Ashton Kutcher’s character finds that he has an unusual power to go back into certain points of his childhood, still maintain the current consciousness of his adulthood, and change the way he’d acted back then and hence change the future. It’s the old concept of “If I only knew then what I know now, how I would’ve lived differently.” He soon finds, however, that his changes didn’t necessarily make for a better future, and he’d re-do the past over and over again, trying to find the “right” solution so that his loved ones don’t end up dying, dead, a heroin-addicted prostitute, with the wrong people. Coincidentally, my beloved non-blood sister Jordan was on her social networking page wishing to find the Re-Do Store, so she could relive specific times of her recent past and change some decisions that have now brought her to unhappiness. Of course I was not a stranger to the same thoughts. “I want a re-do of this time period and completely eliminate this person from having had a place in my life.” Who hasn’t thought that, in some form or other? “I wish I’d never met you.” “I wish that on that ill-fated day in January, I had not accepted your stranger’s invitation to share the table with you at the crowded Starbucks, and had gone home instead, never to have seen you again, nor to have even learned your name.” Sometimes I’ve wished for re-dos so fervently, with every fiber of my existence, that it seemed impossible that I DIDN’T go back in time.

But how do I know that I didn’t? Maybe the fact that I’m alive right now and that my loved ones are alive, healthy (for the most part) and generally content, IS the best proof that I AM on my desired path. Maybe in some alternate reality, life is a whole lot worse, and this path I’m on right now is the “corrected” path. The problem with magically going back and correcting something by eliminating a pain is that without having experienced the pain, you’re unaware that you’re NOT in pain. I wish I hadn’t turned on Jeronimo Street that annoying morning when I got my first speeding ticket months ago, but if I could go back and fix that, I wouldn’t KNOW that I avoided a ticket, so I couldn’t even appreciate it. I’d probably be bitching about something else I wish I could go back in time to avoid. That being the case, how do I know that daily decisions I’ve made HAVEN’T effectively prevented disastrous results? I made it to work alive, with no damage to my car, no ticket. That’s a pretty successful morning, and maybe if I’d only left 5 minutes earlier or later, I would’ve been involved in a collision and right now I’d be wishing I could go back and leave when I actually DID leave. So really, who’s to say that there’s anything WRONG with current life, or that we DIDN’T get our wishes of preventing trauma?

All you can do is live now with the future in mind, i.e. In 10 years, how do you want to look back to today and see your life? These are thoughts I’d had for decades, and never really knew how to express them conceptually. I’d probably come back and read this in the future and think, “What?! What the hell was I rambling about?!” See, you can’t express this stuff properly on a status message. You also can’t go back and search through or re-read old status messages from years ago and laugh at yourself.