Time Travellers
Whether we realise it or not, we are all time travellers. The time machine is our mind and in any given moment we are either in the past, the present, or the future.
Where do you spend your time?
Neither of these places is good or bad of themselves but what determines the usefulness of the visit is what we do with our time when we are there.
The past:
We usually go there to visit our regrets or achievements.
The present:
When we are here, we are enjoying or enduring life, waiting for or preparing for the future. Here we have the opportunity to learn new things, learn from past mistakes or relive them.
The future:
We visit the future when we dwell on our dreams and aspirations, or our fears.
The paradox of time travel
The paradox of time travel is that you couldn’t physically go backwards or forward in time to pay a visit to yourself without cancelling yourself out. And yet, when we travel to the past or the future (in our memories or our imagination) we visit ourselves all the time but with different results. Instead of being cancelled out by the ‘past you’ or the ‘future you’, the ‘present you’ is reinforced either positively or negatively by them. We follow and are fed by what we dwell on. If we dwell on failure we expect it, we entertain it, and we reap it.
Graves or Shrines?
A grave is any place that becomes the receptacle of what is dead, lost, or past.
A shrine is a site hallowed by association with a revered person or object or with an important event.
In life we all make mistakes, and we all have successes no matter how minor. The important thing is when we travel back to the past to visit our failures or achievements, we shouldn’t dwell on them but learn from them. If we keep visiting a mistake without learning from it, it will be our rut and eventually our grave. Likewise, if we visit a past achievement without aiming to build on it, it will turn into a shrine. Neither grave nor shrine can help us to develop. They both prevent us from focussing on the present and they minimise our achievements in the future.
The Butterfly effect
The Butterfly effect is a principle in chaos theory which states that in any dynamic system, small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time. In other words, we cannot predict with accuracy what might have happened if we had taken a course of action that we are currently beating ourselves up for. If we had done things differently it might have started off a chain of events that we didn’t think about, which indirectly would have changed the course of our future – for better or for worse. We’ll never know.
The golden rule of time travel is “never alter the past, as it may create an alternate reality.” In that alternate reality, there’s no guarantee that you or the people that you presently know would still exist or that you’d be the same person with the same friends. The past is past. We can only affect the future by changing the present. So if you need to ask someone for forgiveness – do it. If you need to forgive yourself – do it.
If you need to forgive yourself – do it.
But push the button and move on. Don’t let a rut or a shrine turn into a grave.