As a 20-year-old girl sitting here watching my eighth "One Tree Hill" episode today, one line in particular catches my attention: “Do you ever want to go back? I remember being 16 and everything just seemed much easier. Would you do it differently?”
Immediately I think about the last four years of my life, and cannot help but to answer those questions. "No, I do not want to go back and I would not do a thing differently." Meanwhile my best friend disagreed and said something I found interesting.
His response was, when you are sixteen you take it for granted, and it is not until later in life that you realize how little responsibilities you had and that your choices were much less important. It is not until later that you realize there was so much more you could have done with that time.
Milan Kundera writes in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.” The quote means that the more hardship and mistakes we experience the more fruitful our lives really become. We have survived more, learned more, and become wiser by knowing what we should have done differently. We have to be willing to accept the mistakes and hardships as something that could be fruitful for us and our growth.
The reason I disagree with my friend is because I think the mistakes we make are the things that shape us into who we are meant to be. We need the mistakes to show us who not to be, and to aid us in becoming a better version of ourselves. Every hardship we endure is made to strengthen, not destroy. The choice of how we react to each situation is all our own and whether the verdict is positive or negative, it is how you choose to see it.
So yes, at sixteen you do take that time for granted, but how much of the present are you living to the fullest? How much responsibility are you taking for the choices you have to make now? I guess what I am trying to say is that I think the hard times and mistakes we survive are meant to shape and teach us. It is meant to show us how strong we really are, and that if we wish, we really can regret nothing.
So what about you? Do you ever want to go back and if you did would you do it differently?
