Do Over

When I wrote comics, one of the favorite characters that I created was KickBack (because the name Flashback was taken). He was a character with huge legs and feet, who could jump back three minutes into his own past. Just enough time to correct a small, but critical, mistake. It saved his life several times. This was many years before GalaxyQuest (1999) made that the maguffin of their plot. (I wuz robbed! Or the guy I unconsciously, though assuredly, robbed that idea from wuz robbed.) And that was years before a movie with a similar theme, SlipStream (2005), starring Sean Astin came out. Great minds, and all that. Lately, with my being so impulsive—extraordinarily impulsive, for me, if you knew me—I’ve been contemplating this subject. What if you got do-overs? What if you could rewind time? What would you change, and what would you be afraid to change? What if you made things worse, as was the case in Slipstream, every time you went back? Or worse, what if you couldn ’t do a damned thing because the whole idea is against the laws of quantum physics, but you nonetheless just kept thinking about the concept over and over? Well, talk about it, of course.

See, the key to what makes the concept palatable is the time frame. If we were to talk about big do overs, we’d be talking about concepts like the movie Family Man, where Nick Cage goes back ten years, and sees where his life would be if he made a different decision at a key juncture. The problem I had with the end of that movie was, no matter what he did at the end, he still would never be able to make that decision ten years ago. Though he could maybe get Tea Leoni back, he’d never have those two gorgeous kids, never recapture the joy of that life. The ending was a maybe, at best. That kind of ending, and that line of pursuit, is just maddening. The time frame of a few months, a few days, a few hours, or even a few minutes is much easier to swallow.

What we need is a rewind button. Or maybe just a rewind card, like a business card, that you keep handy in your front pocket. That’d be something you could hold up, and use to take back the last 5 minutes—yeah, 5 minutes is a good amount—of time or conversation, and get a re-do. How often in a day would you do that? How often in a lifetime?

Maybe it’s something we can agree to in relationships. Not every relationship, of course—just the ones that meant the most to you. The ones that need the most caring, and you have the most care, for. You say something awkward and out of place, and then realize and regret the consequences. So you pull out your one hour do-over card and bzzzppp , the thing never happened, the words were never said, the action, whatever it was, never contemplated. Do-over. Man, how tempting would that be?

But, of course, there are consequences, and memory, though buriable, and even selective at times, is not erasable. What we have in its place is love, understanding, and forgiveness, and the ties that bind which facilitate those things. So that when you can’t erase, or forget, you can move past, and forgive. And for those instances where you can’t do any of the above, have the willingness to move forward.

Because, really, there's no other choice. Dammit.