The Almost Time Traveller

It's been a while since I've written. Over a year. 

Frankly, I find that inexcusable, based upon the goals and aspirations for this blog that I previously had. However, tonight something caused me to reflect and inspired me to share a few simple thoughts. 

I’m currently away on a work trip and I went out for dinner tonight. I had gotten a recommendation to visit a restaurant that had a superb view of the surrounding area, as well as some amazing food. So I gathered a couple of my coworkers and off we went.

The view was lovely, the food was wonderful. And the sweet tea was just right.

I texted the person who had recommended it and they told me when they had last had a meal there. And there, on that patio, listening to the crickets and sounds of the hillside, as the sun set behind some clouds, I began to think.

I began to think about the couple in their mid-twenties who last had dinner there on this patio in 1978.  My parents.

It is an odd feeling to visit a place that plays a part in one’s history, although one has never been there. It is an odd feeling to think back to that couple sitting possibly in the same place I sat, my father’s laugh, my mother’s long hair probably over her shoulders the way she wore it at that time. A young couple, like any other, wondering about themselves and their future. 

What were their thoughts? Their hopes? Their dreams? Did they share them at that dinner? How did the world look to them, and what did their future look like?

I became lost in this scenario, fixated upon a tree on the patio that was quite a bit older than 43 years, as my coworkers’ conversation faded to a murmur and lightning flashed in the billowing evening clouds to the west. I could almost see them sitting there together before I or any of my siblings ever existed.  Much like the sonder I experience in the airport or on the subway, a strange feeling came over me.  Yet this was more complex. A fascination with the passage of time and space, and a realization that, in the eyes of everything external to Earth and man’s temporal concepts, I was quite literally occupying that patio with my parents. Whether it was the same moment or 43 years difference was immaterial to the greater clock, the sidereal clock, or the space in the universe where time simply does not exist, because everything just is. 

I found comfort in that. I relished sitting on that patio, only 43 years apart from sitting with my young parents. And in so doing, I even felt like a sort of time traveler; for when we remove time from the equation, space is all that is left.  And we were close in that space.  

This is a recurring theme for me, whether with places my parents have been, old castles, Roman ruins, or abandoned forts in Wyoming. What is old, really isn’t that old, and time that has passed, really has not been that much time. I often feel familiarity, or comfort, or (on occasion) chilling fear in old places. Places that carry history. Places where all that separates us from our predecessors is time.

After all, if we share space, and reflect, we are halfway to achieving time travel. Aren’t we?