The Butterfly Effect 🦋

Let’s say you could tell your 20 year old self something from the standpoint of 40 extra years of experience. Would you tell them what was going to happen to you, or who you were going to marry? My 20 year old self was facing injury and long years to full recovery from a serious ankle injury, suffered during RAF basic training, that had all sorts of knock on effects. He had his first real adult infatuation with a lovely young lady from the Faroe Islands but she was having fun and he was taking it much too seriously and would get hurt by the inevitable break up. He was well over a year away from his first real relationship and, even then, he was going to take the same approach. I might go forward a year or so and say that his eventual discharge would give him the opportunity to go to the USA for a summer and that it will change him completely.

The trouble with telling him anything like that is that I would be changing his/my personality at an incredibly important time. I have read the Butterfly Effect book. The latter was one I thoroughly enjoyed in my teens and it was clear on the fact that any changes to the past would affect the present. To give myself a preview of what lay ahead would be to present myself with a situation where I ended up doing things differently and potentially missing out on what would really change me in years ahead, namely my marriage. It’s far too risky so I will avoid any time travelling of that type thank you! Actually there is one thing I would tell my 20 year old self that he/I desperately needed to hear. Don’t be such an idiot with money!