Why life offers no DO-OVERS

“If I had it all to do over again…” Wouldn’t you skip everything that got you to where you are today? I’m not speaking of the exciting but difficult undertakings of being offered a good but demanding job or landing a scholarship that makes being a college student twice as hard. I’m talking about more frustrating instances in your life that yielded some level of resolve and spiritual fortitude.

Skipping the hypothetical in favor of my own anecdotal history, junior high was hard. School bus rides, peer pressure, rejection when the girl you liked marked “no” on the note your wrote her that said, “Be my girlfriend __ Yes __ No.”  You gotta be kidding me if you think I’d do that over again. Or how about my first job at Vons? I’d worked before 1992 but never had taxes taken out of my hard earned pay. And as if that wasn’t enough, it was my first exposure to the cut-throat work environment where you sometimes pull the weight of others who are being paid the same as you. Given the choice to work for pennies while fellow co-workers cheat the system I’d pass on that too. Then again, there was the job I had shortly after college where my boss reprimanded me for personal emails on company time. I had become the guy not pulling his weight and was nearly fired for it. Maybe I’d fix that last item if I could go back in time.

But the majority of hard learned lessons in my life have been and are being formed through unpredictable adversity and myriad alternatives. It’s almost as if the brain, body and spirit we’ve been given thrives on problem solving and the contriteness birthed out of repentance. Urgency and dilemma push us to extremes we’d never visit on our own volition. And for most of us, brutality and recklessness usually take us to places of pain or public correction. Our mistakes usually culminate with some type of embarrassing outcome like the time I spent 5 minutes insulting a teacher who was standing right behind me while my “friends” stood in silence. I learned grace from that teacher as she continued to help me pass her class without waging personal war against the comedic seventh grader. There’s no way I’d go back in time and not skip that moment of indiscretion.

There’s a reason we don’t get do-overs.