How many times have you heard someone say this: “If I had known then what I know now, I would never have (fill in this blank with a great story).” As a rule, the story filling in the blank will be about some unexpected success, or some particularly spectacular failure, or just an interesting narrative. But successful or not, it is almost always a story that is profoundly important to the teller, a treasured memory, and most likely something that made a big difference in the life of the person telling it. What makes an “I-would-never-have” story so poignant is the knowledge that something has been lost. Just behind the narrative there is more than a touch of nostalgia and yearning for that time when “I didn’t know,” a return to times that were somehow more immediate, more fulfilling and perhaps more productive. Even so, an “I-would-never-have” story is almost always positive in some way, and there’s an important reason for this.
