Simulations

I've always suspected that if I drove the correct speed, along the exact reverse route of a past road trip, it would be possible to re-spool that original journey.

A few weeks ago I was sitting on the beach in Chicago, reading Charles Mingus' Beneath the Underdog. As I lifted my eyes from the book—from a passage about an ex-lover of Mingus' and the casual news that she was now living with a guy in France—to the beach and the rising of Lake Michigan, I thought about an old girlfriend of mine who was recently married. I've often thought of many episodes from my past that things could easily have gone differently—not necessarily better or worse, just differently. But that day I caught myself feeling, on some subconscious level, that the events of my past actually are going to come around again, and that somehow I'll be able to watch them play out again, maybe differently, like a physicist running simulations in a laboratory.

This isn't true, of course. 

There is no wistfulness, no regret; only the impossibility of ever realizing that the past is gone.

My instinct on this matter is not exactly a many-lives or a reincarnation hypothesis. Rather, it's a suspicion that I'll get to try this life again, with the same starting conditions.

So many things are cyclic. Am I to believe that time and our lives aren't?