Every time you move, you leave behind the version of you who stayed.

Tim Minchin, The Guardian, December 8, 2023

Our internet connection was upgraded from dial-up to 1.5 Mbps at the very end of 2009, and we could finally stream audio and video. I immediately moved my radio listening habit from CBC to BBC, mostly Radio 4 and Radio 2.

I was doing the dishes at the kitchen sink one night in January 2010, listening to a BBC Radio 2 music show. The host was reading out messages from listeners across the UK, and it was thrilling magic to be able to hear this live from so far away.

I looked at the window in front of me, my own reflection staring back in the black window, blurry in the steamed-up window. There are no outside lights or houses close enough to see, so at night there is only inky darkness beyond.

For a few seconds, I was the me who had stayed in England, who never returned to Canada after I lived in London for a while in the mid-1980s. That version of me wasn’t any clearer than that, just as murky and dark as the view out that nighttime window, but she was there, somewhere in England, doing the dishes, listening to the BBC. And then she was gone, and I was where I was.

It wasn’t a sad or happy feeling, more a neutral “hello, you” acknowledgment of the choice I had made to return to Canada, the alternative path I hadn’t taken. I went on to move many more times around Canada, making new friends, living new lives, looking out new windows, until now finding myself back exactly where I started.

The “what if” game is almost always a dangerous and pointless pursuit, and I used to do it a lot. If I edge toward it now, I try to look back and see my younger self moving through the world, equipped only with the information I had at the time, and marvel that I made as many good decisions as I did. I have become kinder to past me than I used to be, and that is freeing.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.

(Origin of quote unclear, and attributed to nearly everyone on the internet.)