Looking Back at the Past: The Yearning for Second Chances

If you could go back, would you? Or better yet- what would it mean to you to have a second chance at something?

There’s something so compelling and enduring about these questions, and yet they’re purely imaginative exercises. The moment you answer, you realize with a bitter sigh that you’ll never actually get the chance to return to a given point in your past to try and force a different outcome to the one you got. As the Three-Eyed Raven put it: the ink is dry. And yet we can’t help but imagine how things would have turned out if past events happened differently. Wouldn’t it be more productive (and healthy) to imagine a better future than a better past? What’s really going on here, when we know that time travel isn’t possible and probably never will be?

I’ve been thinking about this recently, because I just finished reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It’s a quirky little novel that’s themed around many of these questions. And given that the novel is a bestseller in Japan, it’s obvious that people have an appetite for them. In short, it’s about a mysterious café in the backstreets of Tokyo that’s rumored to be able to transport its patrons back in time.

After finishing the book, I asked my parents if there was a particular moment in their respective lives that they…