Ultimately, your relationships from grade school will always be what they were. Years go by and you happen chance to cross paths with someone you knew once upon a time. Maybe they are someone you paled around with.\u00a0 Maybe it’s someone who bullied you.\u00a0 Maybe it’s someone you were, and still are, deeply madly in love with.\u00a0 And the two of you tentatively reestablish a link between you.\u00a0 And maybe you both decide not to let the past happen again.\u00a0 You’re both grown up now.\u00a0 Things will be better this time.\u00a0 And for a time they are.\u00a0 And then, slowly but it seems inevitably, you both fall back into the old patterns of behavior.\u00a0 It feels like you are trapped in a time warp, no matter what you both do.\u00a0 And perhaps in a sense that’s what it is.<\/p>\n
It’s like the time travel paradox. Say you have powerful regrets about events in your past…so you invent a time machine, so you can go back in time and change what happened.\u00a0 Maybe it’s something you regret doing, or that was done to you.\u00a0 Maybe it’s a chance you wish you had taken.\u00a0 So you invent your time machine and go back in time and you fix that thing you have wanted to fix all these years.\u00a0 But now the present stops being what it is and so you live your life with no powerful regret, and no need to go back in time and change anything.\u00a0 And so you don’t invent that time machine after all, and you don’t go back in time…and so nothing gets changed after all…<\/p>\n
The universe does not permit paradoxes like that to happen.\u00a0 Somehow, someway, however it must, time will not allow itself to be mucked with.\u00a0 It isn’t about you.\u00a0 The universe does not care about you.\u00a0 It doesn’t care about your regrets, about your wounds, about all the chances you never took.\u00a0 All it cares about is its rules are never broken, it’s mechanical structure never breached.\u00a0 \u00a0The laws of time and space are what they are and they don’t give a good goddamn about you.\u00a0\u00a0Time must flow…perfectly…<\/em><\/p>\n I have a theory: Whenever you reconnect with that old school friend, or pal, or enemy, or crush, you are going back in time and your attempts to change that relationship will inevitably be defeated. Because time won’t let you do that. The physical universe just works that way.<\/p>\n And if you can’t move on, then just let it be.\u00a0 You endured that regret all this time, you can live with it a little longer.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
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