“What would you do differently if you could do it all over again?” is a question that while we don’t hear a lot from other people, we repeat to ourselves when we experience regret or make a bad decision. As a student about to head into my senior year of high school, I have also been asked what my future will look like. Another funny topic of conversation that I feel like I have engaged in thousands of times is whether I would go back to the past or into the future and what I would change about them. If I had the choice, I think I would choose to change the past. The way I see it is that you can’t really change the future if you don’t know what you’re changing in the first place, and the beauty of the future is that it is unknown to us, and yet full of endless possibilities that you can make a reality through your present actions. I cannot deny that changing the past may have serious consequences, though. It's like the butterfly effect, or a drop of water that causes countless ripples in water. While I have to admit that going back and fixing all of my past mistakes is tempting, I feel as if those mistakes all impacted who I am and changing them would change me, as well. I think this dilemma can be perfectly represented by the saying “you don’t know what you have until it's gone.” This saying implies that we want to make a change, or in this case travel to the past like so many of us want to do, but ultimately may be filled with regret because we changed something that we took for granted, such as those mistakes and errors. The things that we lose mean so much to us because we know we can’t have them anymore, but will they still be special if we can go back and have them again? Even if I haven’t made some of the best decisions, I wouldn’t change any of them because they all have gotten me where I am today. I think changing the future wouldn’t be something I’d like to do, because the beauty of the future is that it is what you make it and it's a sign of better things to come. It won’t be as hopeful if I know what is to come for me. People say it all the time, but I want to live in the moment.