RETURNING TO TIMELINES

I’ve been contemplating time, and its breathtaking ability to change everything without you knowing.

You leave someone’s timeline at a point along their path (A), and you’re pretty sure you know what happens next. In fact you’re so sure that you freeze the memory in your mind, ready for next time.

Then time messes up the path without you looking.

One day, you suddenly slip back into their timeline and it becomes obvious that everything is very different at B. Time has changed. Or perhaps you have, without realising, or they have, or the universe has, or we all have.

Figuring out what happened between points A and B without seeing it unfold yourself, can be really overwhelming. Within seconds you have to calculate how you feel about this weird new universe, and how you’re going to react to, or process the things that they have had (B-A) time-units to get used to. Your old frozen memory thaws our pretty quickly.

In addition, time is different in different frames - Einstein postulated it. It flows more slowly in the traveller’s experience than it does for the observer. Or in more confusing language, (B’ - A’)<(B-A) where B’ and A’ are the same events witnessed by the person leaving the timeline. Or, in other words, the glorious summer of the London 2012 Olympics feels like it happened about four years ago... and not seven.

Breathtaking is right. Children grow up, relationships blossom and fall, and families unite and divide; the world spins on its carousel of happy and sad, hopeful and lost. It’s a struggle to keep the pace, especially without social media giving you clues along the way.

And if, I wonder (while still catching my breath) their timeline has changed so severely for me, then how has mine changed for them? Hair’s a little greyer, face a little older, fresh sadness, hidden joys. Those are adventure lines, not wrinkles! Yet what adventure gave them to me? What story lies behind this old face since point A when last we parted?

I conclude that life is short; it seems like the only thing to say - we have time between the points, and mountains to climb and oceans to sail, but not a lot of it. 

So whatever we do have, we should learn to use very well - otherwise, perhaps when we face Point C together, the only thing that takes our breath is that we didn’t live out the Best Story we could have. And that would be a shame.