Truth and Time-Travel

When I was still dipping wands into soapy water and blowing bubbles for an entire afternoon, I began to wonder about the possibility of time-travel. Hear me out.

Who knows when I discovered that the sun, being round as well as the earth, sets at one time in my bedroom while some hours later sets in a bedroom off the coast of Japan. Therein lay the key to my understanding of second chances. I wondered if every step toward the sun was actually shaving a fraction of a fraction of a second off of my yesterday. If that was true, how many furry minutes would I shave by running at the sun until I reached the other side of the world? Perhaps this was the downfall in my schooling since I began to take grades less seriously with the knowledge that somewhere in the world “whoopsies” were being replayed as successes. Luckily someone set me straight, “You can’t go backwards, Cara. Everything you do now happens now and is forever locked in time.”

Well.

“For the scientist, the goal of a theory is to convey ‘truth for now’—to replace an old truth, while accepting that someday this theory, too, will be replaced by a new ‘truth,’ because that is the way science advances.”

Daniel J. Levitin

So, what you’re sayin’ is, instead of moving at will through a mostly psychological function called time, we can create things such as ideas that will at some time change? Ok,
I can deal with that.

A smaller (perhaps not so much smaller) version of myself probably would have kicked my grown-up (perhaps not so grown-up) shins fiercely for giving up hope in things like human flight, talking horses, and underwater villages, but might have been persuaded to desist the torture when I explained that time-travel is possible.

“Look,” I would have said, “take an idea you have, share it with others, hear their ideas, act on them—always with the future in mind—and when you get there, take a look at the past and do the whole thing over again.” Maybe the kicking would have ensued…I hate to say I wasn’t a very reasonable small person.

So here, where the sun always rises in the east and always sets over the watery west, I will not take tomorrow for granted. Instead of lamenting the huge gaps of time between “activities” and inventing things out of sheer craziness, instead of self-inflicted lobotomies over painfully unsuccessful meetings, classes, and projects, I will be ok with all that stuff. But tomorrow I’ll wake up and try again as I run toward the sun.

“Let each morn be better than its eve and each morrow richer than its yesterday.”

Baha'u'llah