What would you do if you could go back?

Not in the sense of “The One Who Got Away.”

More like your own personal “Golden Age.”

Anthropology and scientific research proves that we all do it: Long for a golden yesteryear when everything was better, everything was right.

Being part of my son growing up (he’s three years old now) is causing frequent flashbacks to my own boyhood.

For just an instant, I’m back there again. Trying out my new swing set in the big, sunny yard behind the yellow house on Revere Road in Akron, Ohio. My parents are there: Flush with the confidence and energy of newlyweds starting out in life.

The memory feels like warm gold.

And then it cuts like a knife. Those people and that place are gone forever, fading like the signal from a satellite moving beyond the solar system.

Grief–it has to be grief–is the aftertaste of the sweetest memory.

You have memories like this. Sometimes you visit them. As you age, however, visiting those memories is more like visiting them in hospice care. Eventually, you put some of them in the ground.

And then you become one of them yourself.

But what if you could go back–completely back–into your memories?

Isn’t this the human fascination with time travel? What if we could make a machine that would take us back to the Golden Age?

I’ve thought about this a lot lately and it doesn’t work.

To go back to the past is to make our futures into the past. We could never satisfy our longing, only move it around like photos in a scrapbook.

And going back would not satisfy our longing anyway. It would only make it hungrier, ravenous.

Could we possibly squeeze one more ounce of enjoyment of vitality from those golden moments in our memories?

If we went back, wouldn’t we face the same problem we face in our present?

That is: I want so badly to freeze this moment, make time stand still. Break through human limitations to a full enjoyment of the eternal feeling I have in my soul right now.

I’m convinced that enjoying the human experience means learning to enjoy our nature as creatures in space time. That is, we experience the present full of anticipation of the future and memories of the past.

Life is bittersweet.

That’s the flavor of being human. The bitter draws out the sweet and the sweet draws out the bitter. We have to learn how to be thankful for this and to enjoy it all of our days.

Because it’s all we can do.

Don’t wish to go back. You can’t and it would be hell if you did. Don’t waste the present wishing to go forward. Your memory will turn these present discomforts into good memories anyway.

Savor the bittersweet of now. Thank God for it.

And thank God that space time has a limit that God will lead us beyond.

God will satisfy that cry for the eternal from deep in our souls.