No matter what anyone says, it’s definitely possible to change the past. It’s just that without a considerable amount of effort, those changes are usually for the worse.

Consider: You’ve just had a lovely meal at a great restaurant. You go to sleep that evening quite satisfied with your day. The next morning, you catch a news story about how the head chef at that restaurant was arrested for doing something untoward to the food before serving it to guests. You feel sick to your stomach, maybe even vomiting. Your previous evening is ruined, despite it happening in the past.

Sure, the actual events didn’t change. But your past changed considerably. And that’s what matters – after all, ‘the past’ is just a concept anyway. It doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in your own mind, as context for your current life. That’s why, under normal circumstances, “don’t try to change the past” is good advice. There’s nothing to change, so it’s just wasted effort.

But if you view the past this way, suddenly you realize that you can change it. You can’t change the events, but you can change the context and the framing – and thus change your present. You can’t undo a prior disaster, but by reframing it instead as a moment of growth and learning that gave you new wisdom, suddenly you’ve changed the only version of ‘the past’ that matters – the one in your mind.

It can be hard to leave. There’s a strong inclination to linger; to keep one foot in the old country. But it’s hard to move forward without both of your feet.

Sometimes, it’s just best to hit the road and not look back.

I’m going to be geekier than usual today and talk a little bit about board games. Well, that’s not what I’m really going to be talking about, but that’s where we’re going to start.

I’m a hobbyist board gamer, which means I own more games than most people will ever play. (It’s a whole thing if you don’t believe me.) There’s a common issue that lots of people in this hobby face, which is the realization that how many board games you own doesn’t necessarily correlate to how many board games you play.

See, buying a board game is easy. Assembling several adult friends into a common physical space for a few hours is much harder. In the best of circumstances, for many adults (especially ones like me with jobs, kids, etc.) it isn’t going to happen more than a few times a month. What often happens is that people in this hobby go through a period where they’re really more collectors of games than players of them. They get a game that they think seems neat, but some part of their subconscious is imagining that what’s actually in that box is three friends with a free evening.

At some point, if you’re honest with yourself, you just admit that many of the games you so eagerly purchased just aren’t ever going to get played. (The insider term for this is the “shelf of shame.”) When you have limited time and bandwidth, you often want to play the games that give you the most joy. The core of your collection becomes more important, and the peripherals less so.

Okay, so where am I going with this?

Well, all things take up some kind of “space” not only in your home, but in your life. You might think that a board game you’ve already bought doesn’t really demand much from you, so why bother selling it or giving it away just because there’s a 99% chance you won’t play it? But that’s not really the way human brains work. Everything in your life takes some emotional energy to maintain. Some more than others, but everything. I moved a massive collection of books across three different relocations before I got sick of carrying all those boxes and realized that in three different pack/unpack cycles, I hadn’t opened the vast majority of those books. Owning them was costing me something. I felt emotionally burdened – even guilted – by them. I didn’t want to re-read them (I’d already read them!); I wanted people to know I had read them.

I didn’t want books; I wanted erudite friends who would discuss the topics within. That was burdensome. So I gave them away – and you know what, giving them away started more conversations about those topics than having them on my shelf ever did.

You only have room in your life, your calendar, your home, your brain, and your heart for so many things. You have a limited amount of emotional connection to spread across everything in your life. And sometimes you will find yourself spending that limited energy on things that are not cycling it back to you in a healthy way.

You might think it doesn’t hurt you to keep a collection of movies you never watch, books you never read, a bike you don’t ride, people you consider friends but who never call, or an unrequited love that you never talk about. But those are all manifestations of the same thing: you pouring out energy into a void.

When I take my favorite game off the shelf and play it with some of my close friends or my children, I put it back in a few hours feeling very satisfied. I put energy into that game in the form of thinking about it idly on occasion or in the form of being excited for the next play, but it gives me energy back in the form of great evenings and experiences with people I care about. That’s a good relationship. That’s an energy cycle that maintains itself and renews me.

This same measurement applies to literally everything in your life. Nothing in your life gets a free ride – every person, place, and thing is a relationship that you’re maintaining with some amount of your limited emotional energy. If that relationship isn’t giving you energy back, then it’s just a parasite. It’s killing you, and it isn’t even trying.

Make room in your life for those relationships that make room for you. The friend who calls deserves your friendship. The book that gives you joy to read for the 8th time deserves to stay on your shelf. And the game that gives you regular evenings of enjoyment deserves to stay in your collection.

But the rest? Don’t leave those things trailing behind you, tethered by unwarranted hope until they become weights that keep you from moving towards the actual joys in your life. You don’t have room for it.

When I was about 5 years old, I got my first Lego set. I absolutely loved them and collected them all the way up until my late teens when I moved out of my parents’ house. I didn’t really outgrow them, I just outgrew having the sort of life where it was feasible to own an enormous tub of plastic bits like that. So I gave them to some younger cousins (who were also probably around 5) so they’d have the joy I did.

By all accounts, they did have that joy – and added to it as well as the collection grew. Years go by, and my own kids have now been bitten by the Lego bug. They have a small collection and I add to it whenever they’ve done some particular thing worthy of reward. I mentioned this to the family, and get this – my aunt still has the giant collection I had gifted her sons!

They’re grown now, of course, and were more than happy to bequeath this hoard back to my household, returned after all these years to be enjoyed anew. My kids went berserk when they saw the haul. (I should have waited until Christmas; I could have given them nothing else and they’d have been thrilled.)

It was so fun to tumble back into a very specific kind of enormously enjoyable brain activity with my children, who were clearly experiencing exactly what I was. There’s just something about the ability to dump your imagination onto the floor in physical form, and then reshape it with your hands and eyes and a different part of your brain until it’s taken on a new life, and then let it back into your imagination in a wholly new way.

In many ways, it’s why I think digital creation tools are so wonderful for fostering artistic expression – it’s not the ease of use, per se. It’s the ease of unmaking, the infinitely resettable nature that frees you from all consequences of trying out new ideas over and over. You never waste anything – no clay is lost, no canvas ruined. No matter what you want to try, freedom.

Those opportunities aren’t everywhere, but they do exist. When you have that kind of freedom, trust me. Put your arms deep into that bucket, grab two handfuls of whatever you find, and go berserk.

How far can you walk into the woods?

Halfway. After that, you’re walking out.

Sometimes you don’t know how big the woods are, though. Doesn’t change the truth of it, but you don’t actually know when you’ve crossed that point. Only at the very end, when you’re out on the other side, do you get to know in retrospect where that halfway point was.

Now the real question is: does it feel different, to be walking in versus walking out?

Or are we always just walking through?

Imagine that you’re working on something in your garage, and a tool slips. You get a deep cut on your hand, so you wash it out and bandage it.

You don’t know what kind of problem you have. Not yet. You’ll find out the next day.

So the next day comes and you change the bandage. Now you’ll find out what kind of problem you have, and it will be one of two types.

In one scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks better. It’s already starting to scab over and heal a bit, and it’s smaller than it was the day before. Your hand is still injured, but you’ve learned what kind of problem you have – the kind that will go away on its own in a little while.

In the other scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks worse. It’s red, inflamed, and maybe starting to seep. The veins around it are red and the skin around it is black. It hurts to move and it’s warm to the touch; sure signs of infection. Now you’ve learned that you have the other kind of problem. This is the kind of problem that won’t go away on its own. This is the kind that will get worse and worse until it takes your arm or even kills you unless you take active steps to prevent it.

All problems are one of these two kinds. Often you need at least two data points to know, but just as often that’s all you need. Look at the same problem a few days apart. Did it get better? Will it?

If not, you need to act now. If waiting isn’t the solution, then waiting is your greatest enemy. Either time will solve the issue, or time is what’s killing you. You need to know – and once you do know, you can’t lie to yourself.

That’s the deepest cut.

We all have patterns we repeat in our lives, for better or worse. We’re most acutely aware of the bad cycles when we’re at their lowest points, of course. That’s when we want to break them, but also when we’re least capable of doing so.

Take a few moments today and ask yourself – what cycles are you still in, but on the high side? What will your current actions lead to? If it’s not something you want, then the time to break that cycle isn’t then. It’s now.

Recently I had a sizable improvement in my life in an area that I’d been working to improve for some time. My work paid off and I got the thing I was after. And almost immediately, I found myself thinking about the “next thing” instead of taking even a few moments to be satisfied.

I’m glad I caught myself, but it made me wonder how many other times I might not have. Look, there’s nothing wrong with some ambition. A drive to change and a desire to better both yourself and your circumstances is healthy. But you can get tied up in that desire to have, have, have. Make sure, if you want something, it’s because you’re choosing to aim your ambition in a healthy direction – not because you’ve been lassoed and are being dragged towards it by a desire you don’t control.

On your way somewhere else, don’t ever forget the profound effect you may have. Use your powers for good. Stop to help people you don’t know, and don’t be in so much of a rush to be anywhere that you don’t have time to do so. Stop in and say hi to people while you’re out and about. Make people feel good about who they are, but always encourage them to be even better, too. Don’t take anything too seriously, but get the job done.

Thanks for all the wisdom, Dad. Happy birthday. I miss you.

Some wise words:

1. If you feel like you hate everyone, eat something.
2. If you feel like everyone hates you, sleep.
3. If you feel like you hate yourself, take a shower.
4. If you feel like everyone hates everyone else, go outside.

Solve the easiest problems first, and most of the time that’s all it will take.