Where's the reverse gear on this thing?

I love a good time travel yarn as much as the next fantasy/science fiction fan. Back in the nineties, there was a tv show called Quantum Leap. Scott Bakula starred as Sam Beckett (wink, wink, for you English and theater majors out there), a scientist who was being hurled back and forth in time in a period that covered the years of his own life. His mission was to try to change events in the past so that bad things going on in the present could be fixed. More or less. The show was popular because, well, many of us have a deep longing to be able to fix mistakes that were made way back when. (For the record, Sam's attempt to stop the Kennedy assassination failed. As you may have noticed.) 

And in our own lives, many of us have tried to go back and make right what once went wrong, as the introduction to Quantum Leap would tell us each week. But here's the rub: while it may be possible sometimes to make amends, or to do that thing we once wanted to do but never did, it's never the same as it was back then. Life does not have a reverse gear. It only goes forward. 

Right now we are in this, I don't know, time freeze. We have had our lives on hold for the last two or more months. Everything has changed. People can't gather, and we human beings are hardwired to gather. The rules are different everywhere we go. Six feet apart at the grocery store. One week I was told not to put my groceries on the belt until the cashier wiped down the entire belt, which she had to do between each customer. Fortunately some corporate types got the message really fast that this was unworkable, because the next time I went to the store, they were no longer doing this. But some stores now have one-way aisles. Or a store employee has to give you a cart that's been wiped down -- you can't just pick one up from the parking lot. It's all different and confusing.

And yeah, we want our lives back. We want things to go back to the way they were three months ago. But we're told that's not going to happen any time soon. And when we finally do get back together again, it's going to be different than it was before. Some businesses are not going to survive being shut down for this long. Some of the things we have been accustomed to doing are going to be done differently, maybe from here on out. I don't know the future. No one does, for sure: we can only guess. But this I do know:

 There is no reverse gear to life.  

And here's the video. 


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