If you look at things from a decisional point of view, the life of every person is just a collection of decisions: whether taking a trip by car or by train, having Sugar Puffs or Frosties for breakfast, taking a Tangerine Dream or an Isao Tomita vinyl record back home, all of these have an impact on our lives. Some decisions seem bigger than others, but their effect is sometimes unpredicted, and a small decision could have a big impact in our lives. The decision tree that could unfold in a bazillion ways, makes our personal journey through the Universe look like a straight line, when it’s definitely not that.

And because the outcome is not always the expected or the desired one, we’ve often wondered (and wandered), both as individuals and as species, into regret, over-thinking, and created the idea of time-travel. We’ve all felt at some point the angst and pain coming from a decision that we took at some point in life that we’d like to take again. We’d love to be able to go back to that moment and make the choice differently. The examples of this are countless, many great books were written and many movies were made about going back in time and changing something, most of the time with complicated and undesired effects.

Maybe not move in that new country and start a relationship with that girl you’ve been chasing for years. Maybe breaking up with this other girl after three months, not after three years. Maybe buy that other apartment instead of this one. Maybe adopting that cat that you saw on the Internet. Maybe buy some bitcoin when it’s 20 cents a piece.

Unfortunately, as much as we’d like, time travel doesn’t exist. And it will never exist, because logic says that if it will ever be invented, then we would have already found traces of it.

So what is there actually to do about this? Freeze in panic with each decision, small or large? That’s not living, that’s just existing.

For me, finding an answer to this was probably one of the most cathartic experiences, because I understood it doesn’t really matter. The decisions we made our entire lives brought us in the point we currently are, and while some things could be better, others could be worse. I am comforted by the knowledge that whatever decision I made at any step in my life, it was the best decision given the information I had at the time. Trying to look back and drown in regrets and thoughts of what could have been will only slow me down on the way to the next decision.

Because there is no time travel, and while life gives you second chances, it never gives you the same chance more than once, and the only way to move in time and in life is forward. Sure, it’s a good thing to sometimes think about the past and reflect on how some different decisions could have made things go a different way, but we just need to learn from those experiences and use that as base information for future decisions.

Because unlike in movies, in life there are no take twos and no takesies backies.

PS: After writing this article, I dozed off for a bit and had a strange dream that was the starting point for this article: Five Years and Twelve Minutes