The speed of life

"Can people time travel, Daddy?”An innocent question from my seven-year-old daughter one night, while preparing her for bed. She had been watching cartoons during the day, one in particular about anime robots sent back to dinosaur days, then hurtling forward into an anime future.

I’d been thinking about time travel myself, lately. Watching the final episodes of Lost, for instance, where alternate realities unfold with ease whenever someone moves a wheel on the island. I’d been reading, too, about String Theory physics, the notion that subatomic particles are not orbiting subparticles like neurons and electrons, but bands of string, interwoven and inextricable: their vibrations change everything, even the fabric of time. From String Theory, too, comes the notion that there exists not three or four dimensions, but 10 or 11 in our midst. It makes watching Shrek Forever After in simple 3-D at your local cineplex seem pretty lame.

(Speaking of Lost, my wife and I discussed the show’s finale, what it all meant. I posited that the last season was a sort of purgatory before the characters could “let go” of their life’s baggage, and that perhaps the whole island — its complicated story lines, its labyrinthine plot twists, the fabric of most of the show, in fact — was a collective mental construct in this limbo, that it didn’t really happen. Yup, it was all “just a dream.” All that mattered for the characters of Lost was their “letting go.” Unfortunately, by the time they come to this realization, they’re all dead — victims of the original plane crash. Anyway, enjoy the afterlife, dudes!)

My daughter just started second grade, and that number alone makes me think she’s growing up way too fast, like the time travel machine is out of control, set for the future without an “off” switch. Sometimes, seeing in her flashes of what I’m sure is her future grown-up life, I mentally picture high school graduation, finding a life path, some career that she loves, and yes (gulp…), even dating.

We can’t help inventing scenarios, alternate universes for our kids, our loved ones. We’ve seen the world, or a lot of it, and it colors the way we imagine their futures. Even though we can’t predict what is to come, we try to lay down possible truths, help them see the way things are, or could be, or maybe shouldn’t be. “If you do this, this will happen…” That’s our soothsaying role as parents.

The time machine works both ways, whipping me backwards whenever I, a father, look at the seven-year-old that I used to hold in the crook of my arm, rocking her to sleep. Now she’s asking me for a PSP. (Not gonna happen, I tell her; not gonna happen.) As a dad, you keep simultaneous images in your head: the one-year-old discovering mom’s drum kit for the first time, bashing the skins with abandon; at the same time, I see the nearly-too-tall second grader adjusting her checkered skirt and tie in the mirror each morning, preparing her overloaded book bag for the day.

Maybe that is the true nature of time: like Billy Pilgrim’s “unstuck” existence in Slaughter-House Five, it’s a succession of events that make up a life spread over eternity — the past, present and future all happening simultaneously. Maybe we just can’t see it, trapped as we are in our quotidian reckoning, our own slices of time.

The time fabric of our own lives is reckoned in strange ways. We sift through our past, sometimes when we’re low, searching for the highlight reels. Often we simmer and stew over the injustices, the bad times, the mistakes. It’s way too easy to say, “Remember just the good things,” as Kurt Vonnegut advised us. Sometimes the good isn’t enough to get us through bad times. But if we could reckon all that life experience simultaneously — the good and the bad — think of the wisdom we would gain. Think of the mistakes we wouldn’t have to make.

On Father’s Day, I think of my own dad, halfway around the world, and as the years go on, when I call him up overseas, I tell myself it’s important to

talk only of important things: that time is limited, and we must share what’s essential, in order to make sense of the line that runs through him to me, and down through my own daughter. Instead, we end up talking of mundane things: the godforsaken New England weather, car repairs, heating bills, shoveling snow. I feel time slipping away, and worry that I’m unable to gather it up, to capture it all in a phone call. But the mundane must suffice; it’s the best I can do to make sense of time — our intersecting past, present and future.

Would the ability to time travel — to go back and change things in the past or hurtle into the future to get a peek at how things turn out — really help us make sense of it all? Time is a delicate thing, perhaps too much for human consciousness to toy with. We have enough on our plates just processing our own memories, our emotions, our separate experiences, in sequential order. Each of us is reconstructing life, even as we construct it.

I consider Isobel’s pre-bedtime question once again, trying to find the right response. Can people time travel? Yes. I do it all the time. We all do. I tell her this: We’re all time travelers, traveling at the speed of life.