If you could travel through time, what would you do?
Where would you go?
Why would you go?
Some people like to consider time travel an activity to fix the mistakes of the past.
Go back and convince yourself to turn left at the T in the road instead of right.
Alter a key decision to avoid a catastrophic outcome.
Undo the scars in our psyche.
Others consider time travel from a tourist or researcher perspective.
Go back and see the battle of midway or witness the birth of Christ.
Maybe stand in the farmers field and see what really crashed at Roswell.
If you had this kind of power, or ability, what would you do with it?
Would you feel godlike and try to reshape the world based on your designs?
Or modest with a hint of greed and go back and win the lottery or make stock picks based on your foreknowledge?
Would you binge watch history?
There is a pattern emerging with the availability of television shows in bulk, through services such as netflix, where people will watch entire seasons of a show in a single day. It’s called binge watching. If you had the ability, would you binge watch history?
Would you jump to the birth of Christ, then jump to the sermon on the mount, then Leap forward to the crucifixion, finally jumping ahead 3 days to the resurrection?
Would you actually watch history unfold? Or would you build your own synopsis?
Would you watch the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand then jump the Paris Peace Conference? Glossing over the specter of World War I focusing only on the highlights.
Would you edit history to remove the boring parts?
Would this make you a scholar? Or a voyeur?
I think the illusion of time travel is that there is one thing. One moment. One pivotal instance where everything changed. The idea that watching that moment, will make all of history understandable. The idea that changing that moment will change all of history. I don’t think our world is that simple and I don’t think our world is that fragile.
I believe we are an accumulation of actions and activities.
Individual moments facilitate tipping points.
Events trigger events.
Actions compound into actions.
Critical mass is reached and an explosion seems to come out of nowhere…
But the explosion was in fact building for a very long time.
If you could go back and assassinate Hitler, would you stop the genocide of the Jewish people? Or would you simple trigger a shift in which nobody knows the name of Hitler, but say Himmler in the same dark tones? How many would you have to kill to prevent the mass murder of the Jewish people? And after you’ve altered history with your dark actions would they begin to whisper your name in the same dark tone…
Before you try to fix the world, begin to work on yourself.
Before you try to understand the world, understand yourself.
If we try to alter the universe, but we are a mess, the result we create is a mess.
If we come from a place of internal chaos, then what we exude and what we create around us is chaos.
If we come from a place of centered peace, then what we exude and what we create around us is centered peace.
And we don’t even need a time machine. We can be a positive change in the world and be a scholar right where we are, in the present moment.
Namaste,
Kevin
