A wrinkle in my time
I viewed the trailer for the movie “A Wrinkle in Time,” which will be in theaters in March. I am cautiously optimistic that it will be worth watching. The book, written by Madeleine L’Engle in 1962, has been one of my favorites since I first read it in grade school.
The ability to alter the events of our lives is an oft-used plot in time travel stories. Many science fiction writers have produced such works. Television has perhaps overused the schemes. A 1966 series titled “The Time Tunnel” was really bad while the 1990s series “Quantum Leap,” starring Scott Bakula, was superb. “Star Trek” had several episodes involving time travel. All looked at timelines as a fork in a road. Choose one path and you set in motion a series of events much different from those caused by taking the other fork. If everyone had that kind of access though, think of the chaos that would occur! Everyone not satisfied with their life would be going back for a “do-over”; perhaps repeatedly until they got the desired result. But in so doing they most likely would alter events in the lives of others. Obviously, if time travel were ever developed it would be highly regulated by the government, which is a scary thought. Perhaps time travelers could not alter events that had worldwide effects. A small change affecting only those connected to the traveler could be allowed. Others disagree with this argument entirely as they refer to the “butterfly effect:” Go back to prehistoric times, accidentally kill a butterfly, come back to the present, and find the world is completely different. The thinking is that the further back in time a change is made, the more magnified the effect. This was the basis of Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder,” which actually involved the accidental killing of a prehistoric butterfly.
An argument against time travel is that if it had been invented we would have already met travelers from the future or seen some evidence of their existence. But perhaps the timeline alteration results in an amnesiac effect or the travelers are actually invisible or ghost-like. Maybe that is the basis for centuries of supposed “ghost” sightings!
All this leads me to wonder if I actually invented a way to time travel. A traumatic experience in my childhood could have prompted me to take that road. When I was 10 years old, my brother and I watched a particularly exciting episode of “The Wild, Wild West.” We were hopped up on adrenaline and chasing each other around the house. As he went down the hallway, I grabbed Dad’s shotgun which was in a corner of the room and of course was “not loaded,” pointed it at my brother, and started to pull the trigger. But something made me pause, lower the gun to the floor, and then pull the trigger. This resulted in an extremely loud noise, a hole in the carpet, and much screaming by my parents! But my brother was alive and unhurt.
Years later, I wondered what made me decide, right at the last second, to not aim the gun at my sibling. Was it divine intervention or a sudden onset of common sense? Or, perhaps my future self, driven by guilt for killing my brother, set upon to prevent the tragedy by inventing time travel! I came back to that crucial point in my childhood, invisibly pushed the gun down, and saved my brother’s life! However, in so doing, I changed my future. Within this new timeline I was no longer compelled to find a way to change history, and so had no reason to invent time travel. Such a great loss for humanity, but my brother still lives!
Okay, this sci-fi fantasy won’t make it to the big screen. However, consider how we prioritize the events, good and bad, of our lives. We can spend our entire lives regretting past decisions. Perhaps we can change our future by giving more thought to what we do in the present.
— Devin Houston is the president/CEO of Houston Enzymes. Send comments or questions to devin.houston@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are those of the author.