If I could travel back in time

I have always loved to watch historical documentaries and science fictions and fantasy movies, because deep inside I would love to live those adventures. I harbour the wish, if it was at all possible, that I would pass through a vortex into another world, or travel in time and then I would know enough or be experienced enough to solve the problem of that world or time, a bit like in Stargate.

Maybe the idea that I would be able to solve their problem is my own pride, just because I know better and I am from another world or time. If I was to travel back in time, I would be able to tell people I meet of the mistakes there were making. For example, how many lives I could have saved, if I was to travel in time and be able to talk to an Allied commander during the WWI – well I have chosen my side. To me, it's obvious that the commanders during the WWI were guilty of slow learning and repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and the cost was in terms of millions of human lives. Any man with an ounce of common sense would have realised how pointless it was to do frontal attack on a position that is defended by machine guns. But most people do not recognise the mistakes they are making as they are making it. Most people only realise a mistake has been made when they feel the pain of committing the mistakes, or maybe they recognise the pain and not the mistake. What is the problem? It's pride. Pride makes of us slow learners and pride makes it harder for us to learn from our mistakes, and pride can make us blind to our own mistakes.

If I did travel in time, while I was in that time, that would be the 'present' for me then. In the case where we are fighting an enemy, if I have spoken to a commander on how not to fight or how to, I would have advantaged one side to victory if the other side remain slow to learn and do not adjust their tactics and strategies. I would have changed history. But if the enemy changes, reacts, adapts to the new ways of fighting, then I would be of no further help in that time. Either I would need to keep travelling back and forth in time to help, or use my common sense to help, or be of no help at all. I would have travelled in time but act as if I am living in the present. Yes, I would be of no help because I don't have any extra knowledge from the future, I am on equal basis as anybody in the present time. I am as others, a limited person in knowledge and skills.

Back to reality, we can't change the past, but we can change the future by what we do in the present. What we wish we could do in fantasy, we can actually do in our daily life. We can learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others and help others learn from their mistakes and our mistakes. We can learn to make better decisions. Will we wise up? Well there are proverbs that remains true for all of us:

"The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."

Some people, not excluding myself from them, when we get warned about the mistakes we are making, we just can't stand those advice, because it hurts us. What gets hurt within us? It's our pride. Telling the truth often hurt the pride, if there is pride, within us. Then suffering from our mistakes is the only way to break the pride within us. Doing things our own way and to have our way is a value of our age and to listen to a wisdom not our own is just out of question. There's no way to become wiser when we think we are already wise.

Well, if you feel within you, "who is Ben to be telling me how to be wiser thinking he could teach me a lesson?" What's making you say so? Could it be the pride within you that's telling you that? If you really feel that way, then you would have learn nothing from me except maybe to recognise that there is pride in you (too, because noone is without pride). Pride is so competitive at its root, it is the pride in us makes it hard to stand what appears to be pride in someone else.