As the year draws to a close

Which is in itself misleading. I always have this strange feeling about the Gregorian calendar. It seems like the year ends, but the year is really circular. Everything about it is circular. The revolution of the earth itself, its orbit around the sun, everything. (Or perhaps oblique, but certainly not a straight line with an end.) So the year is not ending, but it is perhaps finishing a cycle? If the dark of winter is considered the end of the cycle, I guess. If you regard summer as the end of a year, we're smack in the middle of one.

I blame all of this on too much blog reading and tisane consumption.

I had a conversation the other day with someone about whether he would go back in time and redo his childhood if he could. We haggled about it for a while, pointing out ups and downs, and finally came to the conclusion that it would probably depend (at least for him) on whether he would know going into it everything that he does now. This would make him a very strange ten-year-old, but whatever. It's hypothetical anyway.

Personally I would not go back. Even if I knew what I do now. You could use the argument that in going back I could fix all the screw ups that occurred on the way to the present, since I'd know how everything would turn out, but there are a couple sticking points. The first is that with changing something, you would get an alternate timeline. I know this sounds like a lot of bufferfly effect rot, but it's true. Say I'd married someone other than who I did. Or chosen a different major. In all likelihood, either of those would've thrown my life's journey far off the track from where it is now. Different city, different relationship, different job. As soon as that happened, all of your known quantities would go out the window. You could no longer say that everything would end up in a certain place. So much for going back with all the knowledge of what would happen.

The second sticking point is overestimating your own abilities. This happens a LOT. Overconfidence stemming from perceived omniscience about a situation will be your downfall every time. Who is to say that I wouldn't make even worse decisions the second time around? That I would be so secure in my supposed foreknowledge of my life that I wouldn't do something completely stupid and/or reckless? Or if I know that I'm not going to like my marriage or my job or my whatever, that I wouldn't change it to something else that would be worse than anything the present had to offer? I suppose there's always the chance that I could turn my life into a rich playground, but that isn't very likely. Realistically I'm never going to do things radically different from how my personality naturally lends itself, and that includes not becoming an investor or a politician or whatever in order to gain significant amounts of wealth and influence for myself.

All in all, it's a risk I'd never take. Even if I could. Would you go back and do it all over again if you could?