Young children and the elderly know the joys of time travel
Remember the moment you realized that the love of your life also loved you — it was some fleeting expression, some twinkle of the eye. How sad that you can relive that moment only in the miasma of memory.
You can go back to that restaurant or laundromat or wherever it happened and celebrate your love. But you can never go back in time.
That’s the oddity of our four dimensions — up and down, backward and forward, right and left and through time.
“If you run into a wall don’t turn around and go back; figure out how to climb it, go through it or work around it,” Michael Jordon said. That seems like great advice. Had he said, “never stop until you succeed in the past” or “plan for a brighter yesterday” we would have thought he’d lost his marbles.
You move dynamically where you please through space. But through time, you are buffeted along in one direction, like sunlight glistening on the waters of a moving stream.
“How could it be otherwise?” you ask. But Albert Einstein memorably replied, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Two of physics’ most widely-held theories: the Standard Model and general relativity, both suggest that the variable called time can increase or decrease — no difference — and that there is nothing inherently special about “now.”
Physicists don’t seem to question our mental model that time flows forward but not back and that “present” exists only in our heads.
But does time always and for everyone march only forward? If for some, time seems more fluid,
how does that affect their experience?
When you are very young and when you grow very old, your imagination becomes less constrained.
A 3-year-old literally recreates the past. We call these false memories. I have one, a painful recollection of being accused of wrongdoing when I was maybe 4or5.
While traipsing through our neighbor’s property, I spied a lovely flower and was given this treasure to take home to my mother. Expecting my mother to shower me with hugs, she instead shocked me, asking accusingly, “Did you pick this from the neighbor’s yard?” Her tone was enough to seal my fate.
Despite my recall to this day to the contrary, the neighbor confirmed that I was a thief. I cannot imagine that she was wicked enough to falsely accuse a child. So I can only conclude that when I was taken by the scruff of the neck to her door and made to apologize, that was real.
As a young adult, you spend an enormous amount of time imaging all sorts of scenarios in the future. In your later years, you begin to focus more attention on the present, research tells us. This is likely one reason that older folks find such joy in passing moments — a baby’s first crawl on the grass, a plaintive high note in an opera.
When memory begins to fail, you increasingly inhabit the past. Now, like a preschooler, you recreate prior events.
My father, as his Alzheimer’s disease progressed, would tell and retell stories with ever greater romantic elaboration. In the Army, for instance, he was put in a corps of imbeciles. Due to a computer glitch, the first digit of his IQ was deleted, so that he, a man of superior intelligence, instantly lost 100 IQ points. My mother verified this debacle as true. What became increasingly fantastic with the retelling was a corporal who appeared from nowhere, plucked him out of the bucket crew and became his future guardian angel.
Someday there may be real time travel. It seems like a wonderful fantasy to envision going back to correct earlier mistakes (although science-fiction writers warn about the hazards of such action). Losing a grip on reality may be a kind of illusory time travel, and bidirectional movement in time may make life more pleasant. Dementia is a state that terrifies me, so if time travel is part of it, there is a serious price. Yet, if my father is any model, he became happier as his mind loosened.
Maybe time travel, which seems so romantic, also brings real joy. Perhaps the twinkle in my father’s eye as his mind slipped reflected living oh-sovividly in the moment that he fell in love with the twinkle in my mother’s eye. Maybe living in the moment, which I strongly endorse, should be balanced with a fine dose of nostalgia.