The Backup Plan

My mobile phone died right before Christmas and I had to quickly replace it. After I got my new phone, I was trying to import my existing contacts to the new phone. However, as usual, with a wrong click of the mouse due to my misunderstanding of what I should be doing, I accidentally wiped all my contacts out. So I ended up with a new phone with no contacts, which defeated the purpose of getting a new one quickly to stay in contact. I managed to recover some older contacts from my computer but then my phone book is never the same.

When I told my friend about this, she asked me “Did you not back up your data?”.  When I thought about it, yeah I did, but only to some point. Life had become so busy that “backing up” is no longer on my priority list. When I was a student, I usually back up my essential files very frequently. But as life takes over, a lot of things, including backing up have fell through the cracks and being forgotten.

Backup, an interesting but often forgotten concept has been on my mind quite frequently lately. With the recent and sudden passing of my grandmother, I kept thinking what happens with me when my time ends? There is no backup option in life. We cannot put away a chunk of our lives and when the time comes retrieve it and live it all over again. Life is like a bird without legs. It just keeps on flying away with time and when it lands it is the end of it. We always said we only live once but as you grow older, time seems to run out a lot more quickly than we wanted to.  I remember when I was a kid I dreaded the time it took to get to the summer holidays and the Christmas breaks. But now, workweeks flew past and so does my life.

Most of us have plans for our lives but sometimes I do wonder how many of our life plans do become reality and worked out in a way we wanted. In one of my previous blogs, I discussed about expectations and options. We could be as flexible as we wanted to, but the one cold hard fact is that there is no back up for life itself. I tried to live my life carefully and responsibly but sometimes I do wonder whether I was too careful and responsible that I missed out other opportunities that were presented to me. I took leaps of faith from time to time but then I could not go back to a certain point in my life to live through it again when things did not work out in a way I want. All I could do is to soldier on and think of other options. The so-called “Back up plans” or “Plan Bs” are in fact just options to resolve current situations.

Sometimes with the advance of technology I did think whether one day we would be able to “back up” a number of years in our lives so when things did not work out we could go back and relive those years and make different choices. Some people might think this would make life less meaningful as what makes life so special itself is because of the fact that we only live once. But for me I would love to have a second chance in life as a back up just to find out how it would go if I made a different choice. Being able to do so in my opinion would make life more interesting. Further, since it is a back up, we would always have a choice to whether we want to use it or not. So for those who would prefer to live life only once, they still have a choice not to use it and live a meaningful life as they see fit.

Obviously this is not going to happen at the moment and I would need to continue to soldier on with what I have today based on the choices I made in the past. The fact that life has no back up plan did make me to make more careful choices, but this does not remove the fact that I would be very interested to know what would happen if I did make different choices at particular points of my life. Maybe I am getting a bit too sentimental because of recent events around me or maybe I am really growing older than I would like to think of myself, but at the end of the day life goes on and I will still need to be responsible for my choices because I do understand that there are no back ups in life.