Traveling Through Time

If only I’d known then what I know now.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Looking back, the answer is plainly obvious.

I shoulda taken dat left in Alba-coy-kee.

I think you get what we’re talking about here. Time, as we learn through the years, offers a much different perspective as it progresses.

The things that meant the most to us when we were young, can look silly or horrible when we get older. I mean, have any of you younger parents ever actually watched G.I. Joe or Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers since you’ve become an adult? They’re horrible. Awful. Eye-bleedingly bad, is what I’m trying to say.

Yet, when you were younger those were the shows you couldn’t miss, that you hung on every single half hour they were broadcast. 

Tastes change as we age. Decisions that now look so clear-cut it’s a wonder they didn’t slice open your brain, were so murky and foggy and impeneterable when they actually had to be made.

That’s the thing about hindsight. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing if you can look back at a difficult decision, follow it through to its logical conclusion and then learn from the mistakes it generated. It’s a curse if all you can do is look back and obsess if only. . . If only. . . 

Being a parent, we face these sorts of decisions on a daily, heck, even hourly, basis. If we let the little light of our lives say no at the dinner table and not eat his green beans, will that help him to learn that he should eat unhealthily all his life and lead him to an early grave? Should we force her to play an entire season of a sport she thought she liked before she actually had to join in? 

Just how bad — exactly — are we going to mess up our children’s lives with this decision?

There’s a condition called paralysis by analysis, in which people never make an actual decision because they keep obsessing over the alternatives and following decision trees down ever-darker and more intricate paths. If, as parents, we allow ourselves to be consumed by worry about every decision, we’re never going to have the time to actually enjoy the hard work, dedication and tears that get poured into our children in hopes that they will fertilize a wonderfully self-confident young man in the future.

Yet, that doesn’t stop us from crying out for a way to see into the future or change the past every time we face one of these dilemmas. So, I guess it’s a good thing we’ve yet to invent time travel. I mean, things could get really, really messy, as director Bo Mirosseni and writer Elisha Yaffe point out in this funny, funny short.

Enjoy.