Jenny and I have been watching a 4-part TV show called "Life After Life," based on a book we read several years ago by Kate Atkinson. The TV show is as wonderful and thought-provoking as the book.

It's the story of a woman who dies again and again only to be reborn in the same time and place with a chance to do it all over again. Despite being killed by her own umbilical cord, by drowning, falling out of a window, a pandemic, a murderous husband, and many other slings and arrows, she returns immediately to the origin of her birth in England sometime around 1910.

Each time she relives her life, she manages to avoid some of the pitfalls that confounded her in previous incarnations, but then, of course, life serves up new ones.

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It’s had me thinking.

I started off, of course, by considering my own life. As far as I know, this is the first time I've lived it, but there certainly have been times when I might have taken a mulligan and done it over again. I won't bore you with my list, I'm sure you have one of your own.

But I'm not in a TV show or a book, and I've had to live with the consequences of my actions and the occasional traumas life has dealt me. On second thought, most of those crossroads and the paths I took have made me who I am today. If I’d made different decisions, I wouldn't be me.

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The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” But he also struggled with the idea that even if we do understand the past, we’re still doomed to repeat certain mistakes—not because we forget, but because living means constantly meeting the unknown.

This idea applies to generations, too. Every generation gets a fresh start—but not a blank slate. They inherit the world we leave behind, along with all our triumphs, mistakes, and unfinished business.

But you can’t just hand them your hard-earned wisdom. They won’t take it. And maybe they shouldn’t. They need to mess up, figure things out, fall down, and try again—just like we did.

Our experiences are there if they want to draw from them, but how much they do is up to them. That’s their karma, not ours.

And even if they do learn from us, they’ll still face problems we never had to solve—climate change, new technology, social shifts we can’t predict. Plus, the old problems never really die. They just show up wearing new outfits.

Maybe the best we can offer isn’t answers, it’s a few good questions. Ways of thinking. Ways to stay curious, resilient, and open.

In Life After Life, Ursula doesn’t remember her past lives in any concrete way. Just a faint echo that nudges her into better choices. Maybe that’s all we ever get.

And maybe that’s enough.

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As you develop your drawing skills, you solve problems. But you encounter new ones. Each drawing is a version of you trying again. Failing in a slightly new way. Sometimes better, sometimes not. If you don’t fail often, you aren’t trying.

The most accomplished masters keep honing their skills, but then they risk growing stale. So they take new paths and they become novices once more.

Even athletes with huge amounts of talent and the best coaches and time and resources to iron out their flaws rarely achieve perfection. And they never sustain it. Winning solutions lose their efficacy. Our bodies change. The game changes. The world changes.

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Some people believe that we are reincarnated over and over with a fresh chance to make up for the sins of our past, and each incarnation moves us closer and closer to some sort of perfection. But, maybe life isn't a staircase to heaven; it’s a spiral, looping back, returning, and the journey is never quite the same.

Instead of trying to be better, we can try to be different, iterating new approaches to new conditions, a fresh start every new day. Instead of fretting over self-improvement, we can accept that we'll never solve things perfectly and permanently, and that's not the goal.

We don’t get to start life over. But we do get a fresh page. Again and again.

Your pal,

Danny

P.S. Are you in Phoenix? If you'd like to meet me and other readers, sign up for one of our Phoenix-area hangouts. We have three planned this month and have a few slots left. They're all free; you just pay for your food or drink. Sign up here. See you there!