One thing you would do differently

@divegeester said
As we approach the end of the year of our Lord 2023 AD and we look back on our whole lives, if you could change one thing or one decision you have made, what would it be?

I should have gone up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1987 with the Cambridge Footlights, but ~ alas ~ I did not.

@suzianne said
I wouldn't have run away from home with my boyfriend at the age of 16.

We’re you unhappy with home life at the time, or was it more of a being swept off your feet thing?

@fmf said
Just not Brazil.

Or Ecuador.

@divegeester said
We’re you unhappy with home life at the time, or was it more of a being swept off your feet thing?

You waited a month to ask?

Obsessed much?

@a-unique-nickname said
You waited a month to ask?

Obsessed much?

I think it's more a case of boredom with some of the more current threads. If it were a case of being obsessed, as you suggest, I don't suppose he would have waited a month.

@a-unique-nickname said
You waited a month to ask?

Obsessed much?

Calm yourself Trev. I meant to reply a while back but forgot and the thread slipped into obscurity.

@divegeester said
As we approach the end of the year of our Lord 2023 AD and we look back on our whole lives, if you could change one thing or one decision you have made, what would it be?

I would not stay as long as I did in Japan if I had a do over. That was definitely a case of inertia.

@divegeester said
We’re you unhappy with home life at the time, or was it more of a being swept off your feet thing?

I was 16. I was young and naive. I was sheltered at home and treated like a princess as I was an only child.

I'm not a horrible judge of character, but he was different then. Kind. Not bossy, never lost his temper. Then things changed overnight.

Nevertheless, it was a string of circumstances started by my running off with him. It was a bad idea all the way around, but as I said, I was young and naive.

I would be a different person today had those two years never happened. But would that person be a better person? I don't know. Maybe. But I honestly don't think so. And hindsight is always 20/20.

@suzianne said
I would be a different person today had those two years never happened. But would that person be a better person? I don't know. Maybe. But I honestly don't think so.

Ah, and there's the rub of it. This is what Torunn was getting at on page 1.

@suzianne said
I was 16. I was young and naive. I was sheltered at home and treated like a princess as I was an only child.

I'm not a horrible judge of character, but he was different then. Kind. Not bossy, never lost his temper. Then things changed overnight.

Nevertheless, it was a string of circumstances started by my running off with him. It was a bad idea all the way around ...[text shortened]... etter person? I don't know. Maybe. But I honestly don't think so. And hindsight is always 20/20.

A ‘Sliding Doors’ type of thing isn’t it. Perhaps that period ignited a sense of determination which later gave you purpose. You have done well to take back a hold on your life and in that struggle the best in you will have emerged.

I left home at 18 and lumbered into a rudderless period of fecklessness with little sense of purpose or direction. Cut my parents and siblings off also. I have regrets and a dull sense of shame, but that has faded over time and efforts to make family reparations. I sometimes wonder what life and me would have been like had I followed a different path in those early years.

There’s a scene in the movie Apollo 13 which always seems like a metaphor for this; on the approach to earth they have to make an engine burn to course correct but have no guidance computer. Lovell says “all we have to do is keep the crosshairs on its (the earth’s) terminator”. During the burn they are all over the place, struggling to maintain trajectory, but at the end of it they are pointing in the right direction and right on target.

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Indeed sir, that was a strange thing to do on a 28 bus to Bradford.

@divegeester said
As we approach the end of the year of our Lord 2023 AD and we look back on our whole lives, if you could change one thing or one decision you have made, what would it be?

Take more risks.

@rajk999 said
Buy tech stock back in the 80s.

Amen to that. A couple of Apple stocks would have made you a rich man, years later. They split many times, so you'd have hundreds by now.