I've reached a point in my life where (thankfully) I can look back at bad decisions, or missed opportunities and say 'that's the past, what have you learned from that?'
Have you seen The Butterfly Effect movies? Characters travel back in time to change decisions, actions, that they regretted - but no good came of it and the future changed for the worse.
Life is great and all the things I've done (good and bad) have got me here. Changing any of that would most certainly Butterfly Effect my life and it wouldn't be what it is today. Sure, it might be better - I might be living in a beautiful house in the English countryside because I became a world-wide best seller with my first book because i didn't procrastinate so much with my writing and actually followed up the request from an agent from a conference pitch. But I'm still writing, I am published and I have a wonderful, supportive group of local writing friends who I wouldn't see if I was in the lap of English luxury.
I might have made different relationship choices, but then I probably wouldn't have met my perfect match who supports my writing (and all my other ventures).
However, there are two things I would change that wouldn't have had repercussions on anything else except give me more peace of mind.
My dad died when I was only 17. I was a naive teenager who didn't appreciate the importance of time spent talking to your parents. If I could go back, with my current wisdom, I'd talk to him about his childhood, his family. His time in the war and meeting my mum. His experiences as a 'new Australian' / WW2 refugee and write his biography like I wrote my mum's. He loved to dance and so do I. I'd make sure we had times of dancing together.
My darling mum died aged 93 and we were blessed to have her for so long. The one thing I've regretted is that the day she passed away, I went home from the hospital because we didn't realise how close the end was. In hindsight, I would have loved to have just sat with her so she wasn't alone.
I could fill a book with things, small and large, that might benefits from a revisit but I put my emotional energy towards trying to do the best with today and tomorrow.
We're human, we're gonna stuff up. Life might be easier if we didn't, but would it be interesting or stimulating?
Andra writes steamy romances across contemporary, paranormal and historical genres and loves posting about her daily writing life on Instagram @andraashesmutmaven
www.andraashe.com
7 comments:
That's the thing I'd like to do, spend more time talking to my mom and dad. Both have passed on, but you, I still have unanswered questions. Nice blog post!
Thanks for sharing, Andra. And I do wonder if you were that best selling author in the lap of English countryside luxury, would we see you here at Romancing the Genres? We'd certainly miss you.
Beautiful post, Andra. Time with parents is so important, but we do what we can at the time.
Hindsight. Something we have to accept as out of reach. We can't go back but we can be more careful on a daily basis. Am absolutely beautiful post, thank you
Wonderful post, Andra!
Lovely post, Andra!
I agree with you that going back and making changes is not an option, in reality, and likely would only result in some other mess up that is equally awful or worse as we didn't get to learn from that one. :)
I think many people would love to talk to their parents again. I still have my mother but not my father. There are so many questions I have about his life, but I'm not sure he knew himself and/or if he would answer if he did know. One thing I've learned as relatives have passed (particularly grandparents) is that things happened to them and they reacted in ways I wouldn't have imagined. However, it was a different time, a different place, different pressures and mores that I have no idea what it would feel like to be in that place and time.
There is a reason people don't share ALL of their lives, and I have to respect that. As you said, best to move forward. Think of today and what tomorrow shall bring instead of worrying about what happened or did not happen in the past.
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