I am the king of the post mortem. I ask the “what if…” question more often than any other.
But there is a fundamental unreality about such questions and spiritual peril in asking it. The unreality lies in the notion that you can revisit a time and place from somewhere in the future and see it again as you saw it then. The spiritual peril is that we live in the past and neglect the present.
You know what you know when you know it.
The only spiritual mistake that you can make lies not in having made past decisions differently. It lies in not acting now on what you know. The key to spiritual growth and renewal lies in remaining open in the present to the possibility of living out of what we know now.