Reversible Change

The boys watch this show, Sid the Science Kid. Aside from being one of the few cute and not annoying kid shows, it's surprisingly informative. Tonight they were watching an episode about ice pops and how liquids can be frozen solid or how frozen liquids can be thawed. The teacher was teaching them that this is called 'reversible change' because you can take water and freeze it then thaw it and then freeze it again.

I was thinking about this and how it would be great if we could do that with our lives. I know this is not at all an original thought, as numerous books and movies are based on the idea of going back and redoing something or going back and fixing 'what ifs' or some variation of those concepts. But I was thinking about how easy it is with water and how you can freeze and refreeze it into a seemingly infinite number of shapes.

If you could do that with your life and get to a certain point and just melt it all down and redo it into something completely different just to see what it would look like, it would be so tempting to do it again and again. Naturally, the problem with this is that you couldn't just thaw away the parts you want to change and keep intact the parts you like. Sometimes I do wonder what my life would be like had I gone to grad school and done something cool. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like had I kept looking for a job and not taken the first good offer out of college from the company where I still work. Sometimes I wonder.... a lot of things. But maybe I would have gone to school and not gotten married to my husband and I wouldn't have the boys. Maybe I would have worked for a different company and my 'career path' would be completely different, but then I wouldn't know my friend Denna who is seriously one of the coolest people ever. Sure, I wouldn't know what I was missing, but now that I have those things, I wouldn't want to give them up.

I guess it's good that reversible change doesn't apply to our lives. We could be so obsessed with finding out what else we could do or have or be that we would never stop to appreciate the now and the wonderful, despite that it may be flawed or imperfect. I know this sounds like I'm all 'yay for life and everything in it!' but it's really just a lame attempt at a decent post when I've spent the past two days listening to kids playing or kids shows or both.