No Going Back

No Going Back

Life itself is a one way ticket often comprising of changes that are forever.  True, in a physical sense we can retrace our steps, but time is still (according to the scientists) a one way journey; many portals and many transitions that are seldom anything other than permanent.

The concept of choices affecting entire futures (I believe it has been the plaything of many a film director, storyteller or Sci Fi writer) is one that has punctuated my entire existence.  I am Seventy now and have a lot to look back on.  Film buffs will recall the pivotal choices made in the Back to the Future film franchise and I often look back in the same way at life choices and in those choices the transitions made, never to be reversed because unlike the heroes of the film I can’t go backwards, so those transitions are often permanent.

If I were to chronicle the many, many choices the reader would give up and my story would go unread. Yet musing on those pivotal moments is fascinating and a little scary if truth be told.  I will focus on just one as an example of those directions that could have been taken at a ‘crossroad’ moment’.

I have loved trains ever since as a three-year-old I was lifted onto the footplate of a steam engine at the old St Pancras Station.  I can honestly say it was indeed a transition for me; for the paths I trod from that moment on always seemed to have that common link – trains.  My devotion to rebuilding the Ffestiniog narrow gauge railway in the early 70s saw one of the most significant portals through which I passed. A chain of events in 1973 led to me meeting the lady I have now been married to for 47 years, 2 children and a library full of memories; none of which would ever have existed, but for that one choice.

That transition was as much spiritual as physical and without the influence and guidance of the woman I love I could not be the person I am today.  What kind of person?  That is no for me to judge, but that is one portal/transition I do NOT want to change even if I could.