Why can we never carry on from where we let off?

Today I want to talk about why we can never go back in spite of the “arrow of time” (brief history of time) always pointing forwards.

I think we have all said to ourselves “If I had known then what I know now”. This though has an implicit desire to revisit some past time and redo something with the benefit of hindsight, we cannot even go back one day, hour, minute or second (or less).

Perhaps though, we can redo something in the present with that same hindsight and achieve the desired outcome in the current time-frame. Perhaps we can right a past wrong, or improve ourselves or our circumstances by doing so. . . or is this nothing more than applying ‘experience’ to a problem to find a solution?

What I have discovered today though is that a sad truth in life and all my experience/hindsight or whatever you want to call it is no substitute for lowering my own expectations, a thing I try hard to avoid.

Yes, today I blew the cobwebs off my pushbike and for the first time this year I rode it in the warm sunny spring day. .  unusually warm as luck wood have it. I rode to town and through the park where kids were playing ball games with their parents (they’re allowed in the southwest), people were sitting in the sun chatting and reading (no loud drug music) and someone was cooking what smelled like sausages on a portable BBQ. There were even people playing crazy golf.

All reassuringly an English way of spending a Sunday/Bank Holiday afternoon on a warm sunny day, as I rode past on my pushbike. . . into the wind and endlessly uphill. Along the disused railway which was uphill into the wind and turning right along a piece of road I use to get to the Avon valley which was winding in an inclined way.

I turned onto the Avon Valley path which winds its way from the higher ground down to the river in an uphill way into the wind and finally home, into the wind.

It seems then, that I could not go back, not in time at least, to the state of physical fitness I had in Autumn last year when I could do this journey at an average speed of 15mph. No my fitness app tells me I managed a pathetic 10.5mph average and burned only 600 calories.

Sometimes I think its the technology that lets you down, 600 Calories. .  my entire path (felt like it) was uphill and into the wind, I reckon I burnt 10,000 calories. . .  it feels like it!