Stop This Train

Yesterday it was summer. Just the other day it was the beginning of another year and a few seconds from now I will have gray hair and I'll be staring down at the end of my life and figuring out whether I did anything worth remembering.
Time, as one of my friends told me, seems to fly by quickly, so fast that life is a blur and you're desperately trying to catch up.
You sleep too long in the mornings and you fear you're missing something, that the day is now too short to fill up with all the things you have to do or you want to do but don't have the gumption or the guts or the motivation to do.
This past August, I turned 39 and during that birthday week, I was at my mother's house, spending time with her and doing my own little quiet celebration (I've never been the balloon and birthday cake kind of guy).
One night, I noticed a high school picture of me. My face is thinner, hair shorter than it is now, with a slight mustache and no goatee. Large almost square-like glasses awkwardly frame my face. I wince.
I almost forgot I looked like that all those years ago (could it be nearly 20 years ago). I imagined at that moment what I would have said to my younger self. I wondered if I would have given him a preview of all the things he would face over the next few years.
You know, the lost frantic and fun years of college, the conversations you think were so deep only because you were slightly intoxicated, the drunk people who took you to a Waffle House early in the morning one night just for the heck of it, the friend you almost lost because you were too immature to notice your obnoxious behavior, the moment you felt your blackness acutely because for the first time you were one of a few blacks on a predominantly white campus?
Would I have told him about those first couple of years of true adulthood when you moved to a small town that had no bars or clubs and you were the first black reporter at the newspaper you worked at and you only realized that fact the Sunday you stepped into one of the oldest black churches in the area? Would I have warned him about the years where you wondered whether this journalism thing was the thing for him?
Would I have told him about the small dark moments when he felt God had abandoned him and he was all alone and no one understood his pain and he felt he had no friends who would understand him? Would I have warned him about that stupid financial purchase that wrecked him for years afterward? Would I have warned him about any of the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the missteps, the small triumphs, the beauty and the ugliness of the life he was going to live for the next 20 years?
I don't think so. Because all of that made me who I am. And here I am, 20 years later, a blink in the eye life has moved so fast. I'm just trying to keep everything in focus but nothing stands still. Because I don't stand still. I keep changing. The world around me keeps changing. Nothing ever stays the same.
Sometimes, I want to have that remote control that Adam Sandler's character had in the movie Click so I could pause or rewind, so the dumb words I said to that girl back there were never said or the decision I made never was made.
But maybe we waste the time we have wishing we could go back to that time before and change things and that if we changed things, our lives would be better. Maybe so. Maybe not. Truth is we'll never know because we can never go back. We can only move forward, hopefully having learned whatever lessons we were meant to learn.
I remember looking at that picture and thinking, dude, you have no idea what kind of roller coaster you're going to ride. But if I'd known, I would have never gotten on. Yes, I might have missed out on the pain. But I'd also have missed out on the joy. And that just won't do.