Mental Time Travel
There were sweet dreams in the night Of Time long past: And, was it sadness or delight, Each day a shadow onward cast Which made us wish it yet might last-- That Time long past. There is regret, almost remorse, For Time long past. 'Tis like a child's belovèd corse A father watches, till at last Beauty is like remembrance, castFrom Time long past. — Percy Shelley There are so many questions that cross our minds when we think about our time on this earth and we struggle to find the answer for most of them due to the fact that we live in an age where clutter and change are the main trends governing our lives. When something, good or bad, occurs we categorise it under the past tense. If it is good, we hope it repeats itself over and over. It is marked as a high that would never be attained again. If it is bad, we try to bury it and move away. However, we continue to haul the burden along with us wherever we go, in the form of a memory. When we muse about the future, and how our lives are going to look like, future events feel vague and unpliable as if they are going to happen to a completely different entity than us, somewhere outside us. Countless times do we tell ourselves that the future is unattainable and that being irrational and having low expectations are the best tools to have when thinking about our lives. When we choose to live in the present and dedicate our waking moments to it, we are distracted by the past and the future.
The problem with that is that we give time total control over us. We do not exercise our free will. It is immature to state that we have perfect control over every aspect of our lives. However, we underestimate the vividness of our imagination, our ability to relive the past; re-constructing its details a little to provide more pleasure in the second and the tenth viewings.
We forget that to a great extent, we have control over our present, creating it with every waking moment’s decision. We also underestimate our ability to think of a future for ourselves where we are the true shapers of our reality.
We could take control of how we perceive time because at the end of the day, it is a concept that has been constructed by scientists and thinkers across centuries. And we have contributed to this construction ourselves. We choose which moment of time to link to another in order to create the narratives of our lives.
Let’s move along time, which births one phenomenon from another, and go: back to occurrences and recollections past due, and forward towards future undertakings. Let’s decide to stand, for a moment or two, to ponder and contemplate. Our motion in time is not a splurge of precious hours; it is a journey to rediscover, reformulate and reinvent. At the end of the day, we have the freedom and power to jump from one point to another on the continuum of time.
Close your eyes. Do it. Imagine your continuum of moments, little dots of light scattered against space. The most important and most trivial moments of your life. If you have the ability to jump from one dot of light to another, where would you go? In what order? Would you skip any dots? Why?