THERE'S ALWAYS A WAY BACK

I read a short story once about a spaceship carrying people in hibernation (I promise this whole entry won't be in geek, just the beginning). Something went wrong (show me a short story where nothing goes wrong and I'll show you a short story nobody reads) and the ship woke everyone up about a billion years too late. Or maybe they made a hyperspace jump and it went badly. Doesn't really matter and most of you don't care about the details. In any case, civilization was gone. Not just "civilization as they knew it" but humanity and alienmanity and sentience period was gone. It was just them. And they weren't going to last long either since the solar system was decaying. It was kind of a crappy position to be in. Their original intent, as yours might be too in such a situation, was to find a way back to their own time. They couldn't do it. Just not possible. They had to make do with what they had and live out the remainder of their lives in this foreign time.

This violated a basic assumption I have about stories, that there's always a way back. I was quite surprised. It was an assumption I was vaguely aware I was making, but I was not really conscious of it until this particular short story brought it to my attention. I've read enough to know that the "hero always survives" assumption is wrong and that the "good guys always win" assumption is wrong, too. It should not have surprised me that the "when you're lost, there's always a way back" assumption was wrong, too.

It's an assumption I tend to make about life outside of stories, too, and it's not true there either. I find myself, when I make mistakes, thinking "Next time, I'll do it differently." Sounds common enough, but I don't mean "Later in life, if a similar situation occurs, I will learn from this one and do things differently." What I really mean, and yes I do think this way, is "The next time I repeat this part of my life, I'll try something a little different." I also anticipate future decisions with such an expectation. I occasionally catch myself thinking "I'll try this first. If that doesn't work, I'll go back and do it differently." It's not conscious or deliberate, I don't actually have a time travel machine in my room that enables me to explore the consequences of my actions before I settle on a final course (not that I'm permitted to tell you about, at any rate).

In a certain light, quantum theory suggests (did I say the rest of this wouldn't be in geek? I might have lied. Next time I'll do it differently.) that there are versions of me that are making every possible decision. But a) I'm not really aware of it and b) that's still not "going back."

It's a subtle assumption that does not have enough significance to cause problems for me, but it's there nonetheless. And it's mostly wrong.

You can't go back. You never step in the same river twice. You can't undo your mistakes. You can't go home again. You can want to go home again, or to go back to your old college town, but even if your parents kept your room the same way you left it (complete with papers on the floor and dust on the shelves), it's not the home you left behind. Things change. You change. Other people change. All it takes is the single tick of a second and everything is different than it once was. Mostly, but not entirely, because you are different.

This is not half as depressing as it sounds. Really.

You can't undo mistakes, but you can often rectify them. Or forgive yourself for them, and move on. The trick to returning home is to accept what it has become, and to learn to stop lamenting the loss of what it once was.

You can't go back to being friends. Although sometimes you can go forward.

Even when you can't, even when going forward leads to something completely different from where you were and contains not even the illusion of going back, as for the passengers in the story, if it's the only place you can go, it's not a good idea to lose yourself in worry over what you have left behind. That will not save you. It might do just the opposite. If you can do that, though, step from one world to the next without looking back, without cursing inevitability and without missing all that was left behind, you are a stronger person than I am.

But I do manage to make those steps, I do find myself going forward when I need to, and I do not (often) lose myself searching for a path back that does not exist. And maybe the reason I can do that is because I hold somewhere the secret the belief that I can go back, that someday I will go back, just not yet.

It seems to work for me (most of the time).