If You Change One Thing

I was reminded of an episode of The Outer Limits called Time to Time.

A young woman is given the opportunity to travel into the past.

And when she realizes that she can return to the year 1969, to the day her father died, she sees something almost anyone would see.

An opportunity to change something.

A second chance.

A way to save him.

A way to undo the loss.

Who would not want to?

If we were given the ability to return to the moment before someone we loved died, how many of us would hesitate?

But the story asks a harder question.

What happens to everything else if we succeed?

Her father’s death was not an isolated event.

His actions saved other lives.

Those people went on to live their own lives.

They met other people.

They made choices.

They formed relationships.

They became part of still more lives.

One life became many ripples.

And suddenly saving one person was no longer only about that one person.

It meant changing everything that followed.

That idea stayed with me.

We often look back and imagine how we would change the past if we could.

I wish I had taken the other road.

I wish I had said something different.

I wish that person had stayed.

I wish this had never happened.

But we can only see the part of the timeline that belongs to us.

We cannot see all the lives connected to it.

Change one moment and perhaps two people never meet.

A friendship never begins.

A child is never born.

Someone is not standing in a particular place, on a particular day, at the exact moment another person needs help.

A sentence that would have changed someone’s life is never spoken.

We imagine changing the past as though we could remove one stone from a river without changing the way the water moves around it.

But perhaps there is no such thing as changing only one thing.

Every moment touches another moment.

Every life touches another life.

Every ripple meets another ripple.

And none of us can see the entire pattern.

Maybe that is one reason the past must remain the past.

Not because everything that happened was ideal.

Not because suffering was necessary.

And not because we should pretend we would never wish some things had happened differently.

But because we cannot know what else we might change in the process, or as a consequence, while we try to erase the pain.

Perhaps the greater question is not:

“What would I change?”

Perhaps it is:

“What became possible because this is the life that unfolded?”