"Mommy, are memories real?"

...and other forms of time travel

April 2020

Time is funny. It is neither discovered nor invented - it is simply one of the dimensions that we fall into once we are born onto the Earth. We, along with all animate and inanimate creatures of the planet rotate along with it- measuring our existence with nights and days. We arrange our days using specific measurements that we've somehow agreed to as a society, and we measure big life changes based on how much of it has passed - or how much remains. Years of healing, months of gestation, weeks left of school, seconds left in a moment. Time enables us to put order to our lives, to coordinate across language barriers, and to regulate how we plant and harvest. Its existence and conceptualization allows us to plan for the future, and reflect on the past - both of which are echoes of time - and neither of which are certain.

We can do a lot with time - we can bend it, stretch it, save it, waste it, we can be on it, out of it, just in it, have too much of it, or not enough of it. We can be productive with it - or we can whittle it away. We can feel like it is on our side, or it is working against us. We don’t know how much of it we have left, and we are exceedingly critical of how we have spent that which we’ve had. It can be “the right time” for something, or “the wrong time.” We mark it with celebrations of life and mourning of loss. It is something that resets every morning - or something that stretches endlessly, aimlessly into eternity. It is a construct that we simultaneously agree on - and argue about. We write songs about turning it back, books about a stitch in it, movies about traveling through it.

Recently, I have fallen into novels that have an aspect of time travel in them. They range from a main character who can reset her own timeline - even going backwards matter of seconds to play out a social interaction differently, to a woman who must save her son by going back in time to relive the day that his life veered off course, to a woman who wants to end her life, and thus is allowed a rare glimpse into the people she could have been. Some narratives are more effective and believable than others. They all, however, hint at the unspoken burden of being responsible for the time we have, how we spend it, and how we choose to contribute to the world we live in. They speak to, perhaps, a universal longing to be able to go back and change moments of pain, loss, and tragedy.

These narratives - and really, if you look wider - all fictional narratives- point to the larger question of, “if you could go back and change [insert monumental life/world event], would you?”

If you could rewrite a part of your story, would you?

If you could erase the suffering that has made you who you are, would you?

If you could do it all over again, would you?

If you could just…say I love you one more time, would you?

Some of us immediately say yes - of course - who wouldn’t want to save 12 million lives - or just that one? And then some of us remember that, perhaps, we wouldn’t exist today if history had played out differently. In the end, it all leads to the same place - let the alternate timelines live where they already are - somewhen else.

The picture above is from April 2020 - on this particular adventure into a local state park, one of hundreds we went on that year, my oldest daughter (then 4 years old) asked me, “mommy, are memories real?”. Developmental psychology will tell you that she was at the exact age where long term memories become tangible. When sentences that begin “last week, when I was a baby…” are a marker that the brain has begun storing core memories, laying the groundwork for a nascent personality. I remember saying something about how memories are a way for us to revisit moments that happened in our lives that felt important to us, and that these pictures in our brains are as real as what we see in front of us. Of course, as 4 year olds do, she had already moved on to another topic.

Her question stays with me - and I revisit it from time to time when thinking about how memory plays a role in how we define ourselves. We are a collection of our lived experiences, of the lessons we have or haven’t learned, and the people who have come through our lives to help us access them. At any given moment, we can travel through time by entering a memory - some are so powerful that we can elicit the smells, sounds, and sensations that went along with them. We can still taste sugary tendrils of cotton candy long digested. We can still shudder from echoes of cries reverberating through our bodies. We can feel the weight of her hand, clasped in our hand - that one last time. We can suddenly, in 40 year old bodies, find ourselves as young as 3 or 4.

We can melt time in an instant. We can hold our teenage babies tight and remember them as actual babies - how they fit snugly in our elbows, and screeched when we put them down. We can close our eyes and be somewhere else, in another time, in another season. We can shiver during a heatwave. We can suddenly feel like we are drowning on dry land - simply from a memory. We can also predict things that have happened in future time - by sensing them. We can insist on traveling for grandma’s 90th birthday because it might be the last time we see grandma - and we can be right - but about the other grandma.

We are now in June - the season of endings and new beginnings. Seeds that took root in the spring now begin to grow, bloom, and bear fruit. Graduations sprinkle our timelines - both actual and social - and we see people opening portals into their next adventures. We see people announcing moves, career shifts, and ride new waves of self care that mask pain they carry in silence. We observe as new tendrils of time begin to extend outwards into the unknown - or the very known.

Ironically, neither of my kids remember that in the endless-feeling months of COVID-19 lockdown, we went on hikes almost every day to escape the loneliness and fear of the time. The moment my zoom-teaching day ended, we were out the door and on some trail - walking aimlessly in nature until they were ready to turn back. They don’t recall that we jumped into streams, and crossed wobbly bridges to forget about uncertainty, illness, and loss. They remember that we went on nature walks, but they don’t remember why. When they travel back into the memory, it has tinges of adventure and discovery - and none of the escapism that inspired it.

We can color in the lines of our memories to access them with different emotions. A breakup that shattered our hearts led to the relationship that helped us mend it. A loss that devastated us led to discovering a hidden talent. Years of suffering that…you know what, some things get to stand on their own. Today - and every day - we get the chance to create portals for us to travel back to in the future. Each moment has the potential to be a door that we want to walk back through. We can take people with us, or be on our own.

Be it what it is- hop in your time machine, go make a memory.