One Year Twenty Times

If you could go back in time and talk to yourself at twenty years of age, what would you tell yourself? This is a hypothetical game people well over 20 years of age sometimes play which is more mental blather than something anyone takes very seriously. I've seen it as a time waster on social media or sometimes as an icebreaker for a small group. I have to admit it's something on which I've pondered more seriously as I've aged but I often find the more common answers to be rote, predictable and common.

I've considered the question often enough to come up with a variant. If today, I got a visit from myself twenty years from the future, what would my future self say to me today?

I think this idea may have something to do with what Albert Einstein called a thought experiment. What would my older self tell me today? Better still, if not a little darker, if today I mysteriously visited myself on my deathbed, in the future, the last day of my life, what would the dying me say to the younger me? 

I'm considering being Santa Clause during this year's holiday season and it's prompted me to think of myself on my deathbed. Would I regret being Santa or would I be happy about not doing it? Would my old self from the future say to me "do Santa" or would my old self say "playing Santa is stupid"?

I may as well ask myself many, many more questions about taking chances, risking failure, being uncomfortable or inconvenienced for the sake of a more meaningful and purposeful life. 

Fortune favors the bold.

Shut Up and Draw is a book I wrote recently which is full of humorous art and stories about how I came to be a cartoonist. It's available on Amazon. Just click here