• Author: Philadelphia Ledger
• Editor: B-7413
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume 5
• Page Number:
• Date: 9 20 1916
• Tags:
• advice

IF WE COULD GO BACK

Now and then a man pauses to take account of stock, and looks back ruefully over the course. of his life to note the many places where he made the wrong turn or was shoved off the track by adverse circumstances. He says to himself, believing what he says, that if he could retrace his steps and take a fresh start, knowing what he knows now, he would not make such a mess of things again. He can put his finger down on the very spot in the map of his life where he went wrong. There was a blurred place on the trail, where there was no trace of the footprint of any who passed that way and no mark of the woodman’s axe upon the tree. It was for him alone to choose the way to take, and in his haste and fever to arrive he chose wrong, and has wondered ever since.

A man plays a game, or runs a race, or conducts a business, or marries a wife, or chooses a friend, or selects a calling, or forms a habit—and by and by the conviction is borne in upon him, like a growth weighing on the brain, that he was in error. Now it is too late to retrieve. He must wear for the remainder of his days the milistone due to his wrong decision. What is he to do? He has strangled his chance new-born. He exchanged his birthright for pottage. It is of no avail to plead that he had bad advisers, that he was misled, that he was the tool of environment, that a base heredity rose up to claim him and that a latent taint in the blood broke out and wrought an irreparable mischief. The past is there, and its legend is deeply graven on his brow or seared by the brand of the iron that has entered into his soul. Can he go back? The years and the closed doors and the finished chapters tell him no.

But the forward look and the futurity provide him with a better way to take. When Mrs. Peterkin, in the story, had spoiled her cup of coffee by putting salt in it and was trying to redeem the error by the neutralizing action of all sorts of chemicals, the lady from Philadelphia suggested that she make a fresh cup. Seeing that you can’t go back, why not make a fresh start exactly where you are? Decision has a miraculous way of finding a standpoint of rock in the middle of the quicksand. Would it be all gain and nothing to lose if you could go the whole path back to the beginning? You might have done worse. These coroner’s inquests of morbid introspection, these lachrymose chants of the might-have-been, are generally a vain or even a pernicious form of entertainment. Of what avail is it to summons the neighbors and ask them to sit with you beside the un-buried past? Remorse, with its big ‘‘if,’’ is better left to that self-repetition of which other kinds of history are proverbially fond. Too much analysis often leads to paralysis.

“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprise of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.’’

It may be objected when action is counseled as a better thing than retrospect, that a certain troubling of the spirit now and then is the bounden duty of a man who does not live by bread alone. He surveys the way he came and the errors teach him: a failure may be more instructive, and in the long run more profitable, than a victory. But if a man would dip repeatedly into the flood of memories, let him be sure that he can swim and hold his head above the wavesso that he runs no risk of drowning there. To a man in the penitentiary ‘‘stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage.” The one strong, inevitable jail from which he cannot dig nor file nor bribe his own way is his own memory. The Satan of Milton’s grand imagination could not leave his hell behind him when he went to earth, though he had the profound abyss of inter-stellar space wherein to shake himself free from incumbrance. You may be thankful that you are here, that the time is now, and that you cannot go back to the place where you began. You may be nearer the celestial country than you know.

— Philadelphia Ledger.