If Only We Had The Choice

Turns out you get a lot of quality tv-watching done in quarantine. On my sister’s recommendation, I started Downton Abbey at the beginning of all this. I was never into it when the show was on television, and I’m so grateful for that now. It’s made my evenings infinitely more enjoyable when I don’t lie awake in bed playing a never-ending game of “When Will This End?”

By far, my favorite character on the show was the Dowager Countess, Violet Crawley, played by Maggie Smith. I could not have imagined a single other actress as the wry matriarch of the Crawley family. While she represents the old world, she has a more modern sensibility than many on the show. Much of the series focuses on the changing times the Crawleys live in, and yet it is only she that, in the final episodes of the show, can influence her granddaughter to change her trajectory to secure a better future for herself.

Some of my favorite one-liners from her include her questioning at dinner after someone mentions their weekend plans, “What is a weekend?” and upon hearing jazz music for the first time, “Do you think any of them know what the others are playing?”

But by far, one of her most moving quotes for me (and this is owed to the incredible writing on the show too) came in the last episode of the show when the family and its servants are shown toasting the new year, 1926. She is sitting with her friend and cousin, Isobel Crawley, when she remarks, “It makes me smile, the way every year we drink to the future whatever it may bring.”

“Well, what else could we drink to? We are going forward to the future, not back into the past,” replies Isobel.

“If only we had the choice!” replies the Dowager Countess.

And in that line, she summed up the essence of the entire show. It doesn’t matter how badly we wish for the past – time only moves in one direction and we have to accept it.

The line particularly resonated for me long after I had switched off the TV.

How often do we wish for the past, or to go back in time to do something better? Whether it’s last week, last year, or 10 years ago, I know I think often about what if…

Sometimes it’s wishing I hadn’t put my foot in my mouth and said something stupid just a moment ago…

Sometimes it’s bigger…

What if I had gone to a different college? What if I couldn’t have children? What if my mother didn’t die when I was just a child?

I think about these questions often, so much so that they often fill my head at the expense of appreciating the moment as it is right now. I look at my youngest and wonder what it would be like if she weren’t my last…instead of just appreciating the time I have with her. It’s human nature to miss the days gone by. I’m reminded of the Mirror of Erised in the first Harry Potter, in which Harry sees his now-dead parents smiling and waving at him, and can’t bring himself to move from the spot.

It doesn’t do us any good to dwell on the past, the only thing we can do is look forward to the future, whether it be tomorrow or next year.

We have no choice but to move forward, although we may, as the Dowager Countess pointed out, wish otherwise. But wishing doesn’t stop the fact that time marches on. We might wish we would have made another choice in the past, but the fact remains that we didn’t. The sun rises and sets each day whether we like it or not. As Albus Dumbledore tells Harry after learning he has been spending so much time in front of the mirror I mentioned earlier, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that.”