What if you could travel back in time and live your life over again starting from the point you went back to? Would you do it?
To sweeten the deal, what if you retained the memories of everything that you had lived through and experienced in the future? Now you could avoid all the stupid mistakes you had made. Everything would turn out better, right? But would it?
Every decision we make, whether good or bad, sets into motion things that will happen. Each decision we make, the bad ones as well as the good ones, helps to form us into who we are.
The following quote is from Towards Zero, one of my favorite books by Agatha Christie: When you read the account of a murder – or, say, a fiction story based on murder – you usually begin with the murder itself. That’s all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. […] The murder itself is the end of the story. It’s Zero Hour.
That quote pertains to murder, but the same can be said for just about any other circumstance in our life. If we had the ability to go back in time to relive parts of our life over, it would change the future and maybe not for the better.
Writing Prompts:
Look at your own life and choose a decision you made in the past that you would like to change. Now pretend that you’re able to go back in time while retaining all of your present memories and change that decision.
How is your future affected? Since you remember what your life was like before you changed a decision you made in the past, you can see how different it is now. You can see the ripples that were put into motion by that one changed decision.
What is different?
Is your family life the same? Is it worse? Or is it better?
Do you have the same parents? How has you changing the one decision affected them? Do any of the family members you once had no longer exist? Are there new ones?
If you were married, are you still married to the same individual? Do you have the same children?
What about your job? Do you have the same job or do you have a better job?
Do you have the same circle of friends? Do any of the friends you had no longer exist?
Has your financial situation changed?
I’m sure there are many more ways you can think of that your life would have been changed by that one changed decision. Make notes on all of these things and write a story.
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