Time Travel

There’s an interesting troupe in sci-fi stories regarding time travel, where the individuals who have gone back in time are obsessed with not affecting any small thing in the past, worried that even a tiny change could cause a time paradox or some kind of irreparable damage to the future by ripping holes in the fabric of space and time.  The other extreme is its own troupe, then, featuring characters trying to prevent some kind of terrible disaster by instigating a very significant change of some kind, such as removing a dictator or stopping a particular event.  Regardless of whether the party traveling back in time intended to change it, we are then usually brought back to the present, the changing persons now the only persons that remember any other history and trying to sort out just what is and what isn’t different amongst others who see their reality as the true “normal.”  And, they almost always go back to change something else, this time with more intent, ultimately invoking more and more change as they try to undo the damage or attempt a different change after the success of the first or whathaveyou.  The story ends with the individual either managing to set everything back to what they were (more or less) or accepting a certain level of changes in their new reality.  

Dealing with timelines and alternate realities is a lot of fun, trying to think about what steps have led characters to be where they are, working to pinpoint the most significant moments that changed everything else.  Moments could be comparatively insignificant in some ways; they could be very obvious, too.  Some story dynamics are strict enough to imply that ANY change, even accidentally stepping on an insect in the past timeline could have drastic consequences on the future.  

Traveling back in time begets more traveling back in time to continue to fix more things, all in the intent of preserving or bettering the timeline.  The tension of the story depends on it.  Outside of these stories, though, people don’t worry about the decisions that they’re making today with quite the same anxiety.  Sure, we worry about decisions and how they might affect us, but we don’t worry about it changing the future.  Does that distinction make sense?  Why don’t we approach the same present, where we are actively creating the future, in the same way we would about preserving the past?

I think some of this is self-preservation, that it is too much pressure to worry about every decision and how it might be changing the future.  However, I think some of this, too, is that we don’t think about it.  We’re wrapped up in so many components at once that we don’t even focus on the present until something forces us back there or we’re thinking of too many things that we want to get to or enough elements at once that nothing is really receiving our full attention.  

There’s a bit of a balance to thinking of the future while living in the present.  How do we encompass enough awareness of the future without being overwhelmed by it or miss out on its creation by being disconnected to our present?  If we live too much in the future, how can we cope with disappointment in our present?  If we live in the past, what decisions for the future happen without us in the present?  How can we cultivate enough awareness to know the difference?  It seems to me, then, that the best thing we can do is make the most solid present that we can, preserving the future as we actively shape it.  What things can we do better today to resist the desire to go back and change it in the first place?  

If it helps, remember that you are a time traveler--traveling at a rate of one second per second, but still a time traveler.