My mother once surprised me. In a moment of frustration, she looked me in the eye and said, “If only I could be a genie for a day.”
I normally never thought of my mother thinking this way. There have been several stories and fairy tales that involved people coming in contact with a genie or Leprechaun who would grant them three wishes. Most always, those people wished foolishly and wound up in worse shape than before they had the wishes. Some of these stories, and they are fine reading that I encourage you to search out (remember, Google, Amazon.com and other similar sources can help you find almost anything). One great story is “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs. Another is “Why the Sea is Salt”.
Thinking about wasted wishes makes me think about wasted lives and opportunities. Carl and Pearl Butler (another item for you to research) once sang a song titled “A Tramp Found Dead on the Street”. The song has a line: “He was some mother’s darling, once he was fair, and once he was young”. I’ve had a few opportunities to be with some elderly folks who were very close to death, and I always wondered what might be going through their minds. Pleasant memories? Regrets? I think often of Ms. Winnie McDonald quoting John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Maud Muller” I once heard Ms. Winnie McDonald quote: “For of all sad words on tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”
But it is not possible to bring back the past. Life is not like DVR, where we can rewind and play over or delete recordings. I’ve gotten so used to that feature on my television that I sometimes find myself not really listening and then wanting to rewind the radio.
Often in life we need the Serenity Prayer, which I quote from memory: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”.
Trying to change the past or minimize its effects is most always futile. People might as well think of what they would do if they had a million dollars. Even a million dollars is not worth what it once might have been. Even I have sat around and thought of what might have been. What if I had displayed more integrity in certain decisions I have made? What if I had treated that special someone better while there was opportunity? What if I had done a little more investigating before I went into that business venture? What if I had made a different choice?
The “what ifs” are endless, so it is better to focus on the “right nows”. Rather than pining over what one has never had or lost, it is far preferable to think on the good things that are at hand. William Cullen Bryant best summed it up in his poem “Thanatopsis”:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

-- https://poets.org/poem/thanatopsis (Retrieved January 20, 2020)

We have just barely begun to experience the year 2020. Let’s do our best to take Bryant’s advice. As Lincoln said, “Live a good life, and in the end, it’s not the years in a life, but the life in the years.”
I leave you with another engaging thought from my world of email:

Did you know that if you replace "W" with "T" in
"What, Where and When", you get the answer to each of them.