They follow us around. Sometimes haunting, other times it stresses. More join everyday, as we plod on through our life, accumulating. Those, the regrets, the burdens of which we created. If not careful, they could consume the entire conscious, destroying the perception of reality. But in most people, it isn’t that bad… We forget the mistakes, and live with their consequences.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have another try, an attempt to right a ‘wrong’. Would that make you happier? More joyous?

Sometimes, I wish I could just rewind time and fix the mistakes I’ve made. They pale in comparison to most people’s. They seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things, choices that I should’ve been more careful to consider. But then again, the choices that I make shaped me to who I would become. Other people’s mistakes: a empty beer bottle, a dirty needle, a lost wallet could have impacted their lives more than what I have experienced, but are my mistakes less important?

I love the butterfly effect — which is part of chaos theory– which states that any small action (as simple as a flapping of a butterfly’s wings) can make a big effect (like changing the weather and cause a big enough deviation that it ruins the weather forecast). It makes me ponder at night, the life I could’ve had if I had done something differently the week before. Would I be famous? Would I be dead? Would I have won that competition? But then I think: through mistakes you learn, and if it never happened, it would’ve happened anyway in the future.

Like it or not, we are made from our mistakes, as they shape our personality, our friends, our interests. Maybe people’s biggest mistakes are not the mistakes they made, but the mistake of not learning from their mistakes.

But still sometimes, I dream at night of the possibilities that would never become true.