In movies and life, people say they wish they could go “back to how things were.” They wish not just for things to be good again, but also that they’d never been bad. It’s a sort of ploy to deceive oneself that the bad can be erased by pretending it never happened. The arrow of time is, of course, irreversible. Things can become good again but not in same ways as before. Only in new ways learned from how the old ways went wrong. As much as we might want to, there is no way around trauma. It c...
