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Would You Go Back In Time and Relive Your Own Life, Knowing What You Know Now?
I have had several years of poor health to think about this one. For my part, this thread will mostly be about sex and sports, but I should clarify my opening statement.
My health is the result of hereditary illness incurred by genetic defects with my kidneys. I would never have been able to avoid renal failure, though perhaps if even my father had known he’d inherited this illness from his father, my folks could have helped me transition to becoming more of a vegetarian, earlier. Now your body still needs protein and vegetable protein from beans and such are also a problem for kidneys like mine to handle, but perhaps less-so than a steak-and-shrimp dinner. I’m sure I’d continue to eat chicken, some higher quality ground beef maybe several times a week, and cut back on salt which raises blood pressure (such as no fast-food fries, or have them made fresh and unsalted).
That might result in my health today being somewhat different from the way that it is. It might make me less anxious as a person with regards to that.
As to sports: well I wonder. I played baseball for 10 years, also played men’s tennis in my off-season, and got into a black belt program after high school. I don’t think I’d have done anything differently except I might know how much I would have wanted to play football. I was scared in my youth – and I would NOT have been able to bulk up by taking a lot of protein obviously. But I might have been a very fast receiver, being so strongly motivated to not get tackled! And I could possibly move a lot faster than those heavier guys. In baseball, I was a notoriously fast base-stealer, and since I played as an infielder, quite ruthless when I got to go on offense. Perhaps if I’d practiced more I’d have played college baseball or even taken that further? I was in a bad auto accident when I was 18 though, and I had a lot of pain from a hip injury, so I didn’t return to my fastest form. I think with high kicks and stretching it out, my martial arts helped me recover from that, but I didn’t play competitive baseball ever again. I love the sport and played co-ed softball in college, but mostly to meet girls. Still, I wonder if I’d be a very different person if I’d persisted in becoming an athlete.
Speaking of which, if I could go back to say, age 5, when I first moved to California, knowing what I know now, I could have been the most manipulative little ***t and might have started “scoring” very young. It’s just a fantasy. But I wonder how my life would be different because of that? Might I even have been married by now and had children at a very young age? Or was I always smart enough to avoid trapping myself in that way? There were maybe 4 girls in my life from junior high to early high school (while still in California) that I might have successfully connected up with had I not screwed things up with most of them. Several actually were my girlfriends, but I managed to ruin that. I admired heroes like Captain Kirk or James Bond who moved on from one girl to the next, and I let that influence me. My parents’ marriage wasn’t good and I saw the same with other friends’ families (some but not all). But it was my parents who were trying to teach me that I should respect and honor a special girl and that some day I would marry. They didn’t impress me as any good example, and I rejected that upbringing very early on, leaving several of the girlfriends I brought up before. With one of the others, I just “tested” whether she’d go out with me, and upon learning that she liked me, I was satisfied and then didn’t pursue it, keeping her as just a friend (she still is, I still have contact with her, but I’ve never discussed this with her and don’t plan on it either). If I knew where I would be today and could go back in time, knowing how everything turned out, would I have hooked up with this girl, or stayed with that one? If I had, would I have even gone to a different college? (to be with her) How would my life have been different?
I think it might have been very different actually.
College choice brings up another important point. I was tested and determined to be “gifted” or whatever at various points in my education. I was sent to advanced classes and had to take some coursework at junior colleges while still in grade school because I was really quick. I’m obviously not very modest, but I’m going to try to be, so I’ll stop there. But my parents had a college fund for me ready to send me to Stanford, Harvard, or Yale – that was part of their plan for me. Unfortunately, it was also how they measured their success as parents. I deliberately under-achieved (and saved myself a lot of stress over pointless busy-work assignments in my AP classes in school by just choosing to not do them) and I became (big surprise) a discipline problem. Yes: show me an authority figure and I’ll show you my next target. (SSG Mods are hovering over the “edit post” buttons now, wondering what I’m going to type next, hehehe). It ended up that my “performance” landed me in a state school back in California (where I excelled and made a lot out of my experience) instead of at Havard, Yale, or wherever). And I think I got a better education.
I was also in a position where I could get elected into a position within San Diego’s City Planning, citing the need for a student’s voice and representation for a renter, versus just the powerful property owners and business owners that usually win these positions. My grades at San Diego State were exceptionally high – I was getting a 4.0 in college, and my father urged me to apply to transfer to the more prestigious UCSD. To humor him I did so, thinking I wouldn’t get accepted. Not long before he died, we had a falling out because he found out I was accepted but refused to transfer schools (my friends and my life I was establishing for myself was in my community at SDSU). It would be likely that many of my accomplishments in the real world would not have happened for me (or had been very different) if I’d transfered.
When I look back at a lot of this stuff, I really wind up finding that I don’t actually have a lot of regrets. Things turned out OK.
Would you have changed your life? How? What do you think you’d be like today if you did?
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