I’m a bit geeky on time travel in film, television, and books. I love seeing the different ways people imagine or interpret it. I like laughing at what I think are obvious flaws. I like it when they show signs of good scientific research before writing it. I groan when there’s poor continuity with out of date things in the shot and groan very deeply when the end is so stupidly out of character with how time travel would most probably work. Like Thanos of the Marvel Multiverse. Firstly, if you can time travel, kill the son of a bitch before he gets out of hand! And if Captain Marvel can travel through time and space so easily and is so bloody powerful, she could undo all the shit in the previous Avengers movies and save so many lives and incomes. I’m groaning on the inside just thinking about it. haha.
I’ve thought about how I could change so much of my own life if I could time travel. But I wouldn’t have the four adult children and three grandies that I have right now. I wouldn’t be writing this. I might have had a better life, but I think I would have still made poor choices along the way. I recently listened to the Audio book ‘To Say Nothing Of The Dog’ by Connie Willis. Not the three men in a boat book, although there are three men in a boat in it. The 1997 time travel one. I liked her concept that if we alter time in the past, somehow things correct themselves along the way. So say you withdraw one moment from occurring that can affect the present day you come from, somehow over time things work their way around to still coming back to that original present day outcome. I guess like water. You stir it up and it still settles back down eventually. I imagine I would end up like that. One thing changes and I would still find another route to where I currently am, like my story is already written, my character set.
I’ve got regrets. Too many. I’ve wasted plenty of time. I’ve missed opportunities. I’ve missed special moments by holding myself back. Holding back for three years even. Regardless, the thing is, we can’t get that lost time back. It is a lost treasure of the kind I cannot uncover, discover, or dig up.
But the question I have here is not what have I lost, but what am I not willing to lose from this moment on?
The title of this post came from a television series I started watching tonight (not time travel but treasure hunting), trying to occupy my mind so I couldn’t feel my low emotions and do that negative self-talk thing. At the end of episode three (yes I watched three in a row and would be watching a fourth right now if this line didn’t get me thinking) one of the characters says, “There’s no greater treasure than lost time” and follows it up with, “So I’m not going to waste any more of it”. They then drew the main character in close and… you get the idea. It struck me. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind. If you’ve read my previous blogs you know I like looking out for little treasures in the everyday, and bigger buried or forgotten treasures, and geocaches hidden in the bush. If you knew me well when I was a lot younger you’d know I liked solving puzzles and sent messages to friends using codes (which sadly I then had to interpret for them) and making up my own secret languages and pretending I was Indiana Jones or a Pirate. Treasure hunting is in my blood, haha. So when I heard them say that “lost time” is a treasure I had a realisation that I have been leaking that treasure like having a hole in my gold coin bearing pocket, coins scattered all along the path I have travelled so far. One recent big loss in particular came to mind.
The other day I was in a conversation with someone about the earlier mentioned three years and how I wanted to change it. Their response was that someone always gets hurt. I responded immediately with, “That’s me right now. I’m the one hurting. I’ve been hurting for three years because I didn’t want to hurt anyone else.” Three years of lost time in my eyes. I was the keeper of my own time and I didn’t keep it well. No one stole it. I just lost it. I’m going to be honest here and say I really don’t think I have the guts to change the way things are, that I am probably going to keep losing and hurting in this situation, but I am also going to be honest here and say that I am sick of hurting from it. I want things to change. I’ve got to stop wasting time waiting for something to change.
If you lived through the 2020 covid pandemic crap you’ll know all about how many people couldn’t just sit locked up in their homes losing time while waiting for something to change that was out of their control, but instead they found new things to do, from cooking sourdough and redecorating their homes to learning HTML and recreating art masterpieces using things found around the home and toilet paper (which I hope they kept to reuse afterwards because everyone around the world was freaking out about running out of it, which would never have happened if people didn’t freak out about it).
And this is where this blog ends. I need to take a sip of this lost time treasure thing, swish it around my mouth a while, let every taste bud get a try at it, and see how I feel about it after that. Maybe I can make a change. Maybe tomorrow, but I doubt it. But one thing is for sure – I’m not going to start making sourdough bread!
As I leave this I’d like to make a special note here on a time travel novel – Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book written in 1992 speaks of a pandemic hitting the area, how it possibly originated from Chinese bats, about lockdowns, facemasks needing to be worn by everyone, AND toilet paper is the hardest thing to get a hold of!!! Was it people who had read this book that started the toilet paper frenzy? Or did she travel forward in time and witness the 2020 crazies and go back and write about it? Or is the toilet paper thing a loop she created – the readers of her book created the frenzy that she witnessed that inspired her to write about it in the book? I better stop there or I’ll start going on about the grandfather paradox.
Listening to: Turning Time by Spritely.
Now To Morrow 