Imagine you had a reset button. Like the one on computers and electronic equipment that resets the program to the original settings as when the item left the factory.
Imagine you pressed the button and you got back to a moment in your life when it was perfect; whatever perfect is. That moment in life when youth combined with innocence and hope to make you see the world in a totally different light, and made you confident that all problems could be solved, and you could be part in solving them to make the world a better place. You remember that moment, when you felt everything in life was crystal clear and it was either this way or that, and as a young person you could not understand why others were not as bright, or as clever, as you at seeing things.
Now imagine that having pressed the reset button and gone to that place and time in your past, you also have all the experience and wisdom that you have now.
You are at what you thought and described as the perfect place back then, but you have the added advantage of all the experience and wisdom you have accumulated over the years up to now.
How do you see things differently?
Is there anything you did or said back then that you would do or say differently now that you have the added experience and wisdom?
There's no point in regretting what you did back then. Life is a movie film with no playback function. You can see the past but you cannot alter it.
But what have you learnt from the past; from the reset button?
Was what you did and said then inevitable? It had to be said. It had to be done that way. Not necessarily for your own good but for that of others. You acted then with pure motives and no matter how often you press the reset button you would still do it again the same way.
That's the true purpose of the reset button in our lives.
Not to change the past. But to learn from it, or to re-affirm that what we did back then was the right thing to do.