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Hello, everyone! My name is John McGrail, I learned the rules of time travel from the Back to the Future movie series, and I believe that if you’re not learning, you’re not living. Today I’m talking about finding perspective in your past decisions.
So, what’s today’s fun fact? 1985 brought us the beginning of one of the most beloved film trilogies of all time, “Back to the Future.” Starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd the first film brought in more than $212,000,000 and the trilogy ended up bringing in nearly $419,000,000 outside of the sales of VHS, DVD, and other peripheral merchandising. Here are a few fun facts about the first “Back to the Future” film, courtesy of mental floss.com:
- The script was rejected over 40 times by every major studio, sometimes more than once.
- Worried that audiences would be put off by a film with the word “Future” in the title, we almost had the film “Spaceman from Pluto.”
- Bob Gale revealed in 2011 the origin of Doc and Marty’s relationship – “He [Marty-at age 13 or 14] snuck into Doc’s lab, and was fascinated by all the cool stuff that was there. When Doc found him there, he was delighted to find that Marty thought he was cool and accepted him for what he was. Both of them were the black sheep in their respective environments. Doc gave Marty a part-time job to help with experiments, tend to the lab, tend to the dog, etc.”
- John Delorean sent Producer Bob Gale a thank you note for keeping his dream alive.
- The film involves an in-joke where 1955 Doc can’t believe that Ronald Reagan is President of the United States. Far from offended, President Reagan asked his projectionist to replay the scene while he was watching it, and in his 1986 State of the Union address pointedly quoted the film, “Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” In fact, he was offered the role to be the Mayor of Hill Valley in “Back to the Future III!”
Well, I what I’d like to see in your future is you as a part of the Friday Forum. The Friday Forum is your opportunity to share with me and the rest of the Stuff I Learned Yesterday community. Your Stuff can be anything from up to fifteen minutes and can be in your voice or written. You can add your Stuff to the Friday Forum in several ways—by calling 3048372278 and leaving a voicemail, by going to www.goldenspiralmedia.com/feedback and uploading an audio file, or by using the provided speakpipe widget; or, you can type out an email and send it in that way.
Now, here’s what I learned yesterday:
The Golden Spiral Media stable of podcasts has busted out with a lot of time travel goodness, especially with this season of television. “The Flash” on the CW and the Central City Underground podcast, hosted by Tony and Joe have been dealing with time travel for a couple of years now. We have two new shows now based on time travel, the Remaking History podcast for the NBC show “Timeless,” hosted by Karen and Doug and the Radio Static podcast for the CW show “Frequency,” hosted by SILY’s own Barb and her cohost Steve. I’m also loving “This Is Us” which isn’t time travel based, but whose storytelling, much like LOST, depends on keeping up with many timelines at once. I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there is a lot of television, especially genre TV, which is Golden Spiral Media’s wheelhouse, that is giving us as the audience a lot to dive in and think about what might happen when our timeline could go a little wonky. Have you ever had a moment or three in your life that you wish you could go back and have a “re-do?” Usually I’m thinking about this when I wish I could go back and come up with a pithier comeback to something someone has said to me. I’m not exactly fast on the fly that way. But lately, with all of the time travel goodness I’m watching I’m finding myself facing some much larger experiences that I would like to rethink.
Those of you who have heard any of my past Stuff I Learned Yesterday episodes know that I deeply love and can be deeply affected by music. A few years ago one of my favorite groups, Mercy Me, whom I enjoy nearly every single thing they write and produce, put out a song entitled “Dear Younger Me.” Let me share the lyrics with you:
Dear younger me
Where do I start
If I could tell you everything that I have learned so far
Then you could be
One step ahead
Of all the painful memories still running thru my head
I wonder how much different things would be
Dear younger me,
Dear younger me
I cannot decide
Do I give some speech about how to get the most out of your life
Or do I go deep
And try to change
The choices that you’ll make cuz they’re choices that made me
Even though I love this crazy life
Sometimes I wish it was a smoother ride
Dear younger me, dear younger me
If I knew then what I know now
Condemnation would’ve had no power
My joy my pain would’ve never been my worth
If I knew then what I know now
Would’ve not been hard to figure out
What I would’ve changed if I had heard
Dear younger me
It’s not your fault
You were never meant to carry this beyond the cross, no
Beyond the faith element of the song it really has resonated with me because there are definite things that I would go back and coach myself a little differently on how to handle. My first serious relationship was one of those. I was that guy in high school who was the sweet, nice guy that no girl really wanted to date because there wasn’t enough…whatever, I don’t know. One of the major reasons I didn’t find dating success was that I usually hung around folks that were much older than me. I didn’t really relate with my classmates so when it came to dating it’s only natural that I would gravitate toward ladies older than me as well. So, in my senior year of high school I met a lovely young lady who was more than a few years older than me. For about four months we had a very serious relationship. We saw each other at work frequently and were pretty much instantly committed to each other.
What happened after that four months was something that had never happened to me before. Another young lady who was my own age saw something attractive in me plus things in my relationship with my girlfriend had begun to become uncomfortable. My girlfriend was at a different point in her life than I was. I had recently been accepted to go to the college I wanted and she was ready to begin the next phase of her life beyond schooling. We simply weren’t in synch and with the attention I was getting from this new girl I was a royal jerk and broke up with my girlfriend. I never cheated on her but the way I handled it wasn’t kind. She was devastated and I was never fully truthful about why I had made my decision. Sure, I was young and inexperienced in such things but that doesn’t excuse how I acted. It obviously still bothers me today and I wish I had the opportunity to find her and apologize for being such a, well, you know…
It’s not easy to share this story but it is one of those things that I wish I could go back and tell myself not to not get into the relationship to begin with, but to make sure we both understood where each other were in our lives at that time. I’d have said to enjoy each other’s companionship without things becoming as serious as they did. That was how I should have handled things but I didn’t.
Here’s what I learned:
We don’t get the chance to go back and re-do the events of our lives. As much as we’d like to sometimes it’s just not in the cards for us. I’d like to think that my experience with that relationship taught me a few things about how to handle dating differently. I’d like to think that it prepared me for the wonderful marriage that I’ve been blessed to be a part of for more than 22 years now. That success comes with the recognition that in my past I caused someone pain, and that’s not cool at all, but it is a part of me. There’s nothing wrong with learning from mistakes, in fact, if you don’t then they’re pretty much wasted time, and we don’t really have that much time to waste while we’re here. It’s fun to watch our favorite shows and think about what we’d like to go back and change; or, if we could see into the future what we could do now to manipulate or avoid. But, the best we can do is the best we can do today. We can prepare for the future and hopefully we can learn from the past. I hope whatever you’re doing whenever you hear this that you’re setting yourself up for the best outcomes. And I hope your past will not be a hindrance to your best future. I hope you have something to lean on like faith, family, and friends for when things are hard and you screw up. I’m grateful that I do.
I’m John McGrail, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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