Everything matters.

Sometimes you look back and imagine you had a time machine. You'd get in, armed with all you know today (and possibly a judiciously selected almanac or a stack of financial times or two) leap back and make the life you always wanted, correct your mistakes, seize all the opportunities.

It's tempting, isn't it?

See, you know those were mistakes with the benefit of hindsight. If you never made them to begin with... would you have learned from them? Or would every mistake fixed fade out a piece of your memory, like Marty fading from his photo, so you're all set to repeat it a few days / weeks later?

You'd be frantically racing back in time again and again and again, fixing mistakes that keep happening, over and over, wondering why your brilliant plan isn't working, while paradoxes fill your history and your memory turns into swiss cheese.

On the other hand... you can justify. What if you don't fix anything? After all, those were your decisions, even if wrong, and they defined who you are today. You proudly own your errors, stand by your stumbles, proud to be the product of choice...

But what if you've already been back, once, twice, more times?

The One That Got Away is the one you are married to now - will you remember her as TOTGA? The children you decided to have, or didn't. The jobs you stayed in, or quit. The investments made or passed over. Decisions made one way, or another.

What you remember is always going to be the product of those choices, minus the memories made by not taking those other choices.

Doing X produces A.

Doing Y produces B.

You can only do one action, and get that one outcome.

The other will be the road not taken. 

Do X, yearn for B. Vice versa, ad infinitum.

Regret not finding B. Lie awake nights, cursing yourself. Swearing to never repeat that. Leaping at the chance to do the next Y1 that looks like it will get you B1. On and on and on...

Until here you stand today.

Proud.

Looking back at A and B1 as the grand achievements of your life.

Idly lost in reverie - what if B, or A1 had happened instead? Sad? Angry? Drowning in pain, or overwhelmed with relief?

But... A or B don't matter in themselves. They're just how you feel about them. It doesn't matter what they were, you'd feel about them the same way.

So... does anything matter, then? Because whatever you do, it matters. Whatever you don't do, it matters just the same.

Everything matters.

My own private Narnia

So, do you believe in magic?

There are places that exist. Maybe they were real once, maybe they only live in the memories I have of them, selected, curated, gaps filled in with imagination and dreams, but who's to say what makes them any less real or false than objective, empirical reality?

There is a place like that I'm especially feeling tonight. A place of dreams, of wild imagination that  became reality before the eyes of their dreamers, came out into the real world and took shape and form, grew and flourished far beyond what they had hoped, beyond what they could have dared to believe.

Silicon Valley is a fascinating story, a myth made flesh, a world of games, stories, vivid, crazy, reckless, explosive magic. A place and time that changed the world. I showed us that you can dare to dream, and make new realities the way you wanted.

And yes, it comes with it's share of corruption, of cancer in it's bones and blood slowly blackening the golden sunshine with darkness and sleaze, with greed and lust and envy, a place where a thousand dreams died for every that lived...

But I'm not talking about the semiconductor factories, the garage inventors, the gamers and hackers and cyberspace architects and explorers, even the coders of the dotcom era or the VCs of the last decade past.

For me, it's always going to be a proof of concept, a place even in it's hard, expensive, gentrified avatar, with it's rents and commutes and affectations and cut-throat capitalism, it's still going to be a place where despite itself it can be a place where magic can happen. Maybe not the big, grand magics of overnight millions and free information and universal connectivity and equality, but small ones. Little things that are so huge compared to the realities of other places. Air, water, food. Interests. A chance to explore, to try. Stories and struggles. Not the destinations reached and prizes won, but a place full of the magic of trying, of running, of the journey.

And when you come out of the wardrobe back into your world, even as the past fades like a dream you cannot talk about, and you get back to the grind, you come back changed. You come back touched by the magic, fey, a little different, marked by a sunshine few understand. And even if you can never return - physically, temporally - you will always remember it as your own experience of it, not so much for what it was, but in what you felt there, what it did to you, how it made you feel. How it changed you.

And that's what makes it a magic place. Something that's yours alone, something unexplainable, intangible, yet so, so real.

My own private Narnia.