Time Travel

What if the first time you kissed him was not the first time he had kissed you? What if your husband disappeared on your wedding night, but you couldn’t really be mad at him since he was with you the entire time. Of course, the you he was with was only nine at the time. Such is the world of the Time Traveler’s Wife. She met her love when he was an adult and she was just a child. He visited her many times as she was growing up and she fell in love. She spent her life waiting for time to catch up with him. When he did finally meet her—she already knew him, but to him she was a stranger.

The movie is based on a book by Audrey Niffenegger, but it was no surprise to find out that Bruce Joel Rubin wrote the screenplay. Bruce also wrote such wonderful films as Ghost, My Life, and Jacob’s Ladder. I had the pleasure of meeting Bruce in 2005 on the Spiritual Cinema Festival at Sea.

I totally enjoyed this film, but it got me thinking—no surprise—what would happen if time travel really were possible? If it truly were a reality then my future self could come back and tell me if I found my right and perfect church, where it was, and if everything turns out as well as I pray it does. Considering I’ve lived the past year in the void and wondering about my future—it truly would be pretty awesome to have those questions answered once and for all.

I took a class at Unity Village decades ago on NLP (Neura- Linguistic Programming). In this class our future self went back to our inner child to bring them the knowledge that life would turn out okay; that’s a great thing for a child to know. This was all pretend of course. We stood in a constructed timeline and simply moved back in time to assure ourselves that we turned out okay. It’s a wonderful psychological concept.

So, what if there really is a future me hanging around somewhere? That future me would have the answers that I am now seeking. While it might be nice to find out specifics from my future self, it would seem that this is virtually impossible. I have not (as of this moment) figured out how to transport myself into the future.

However, what I’ve realized is, I do know how to travel to my past. The present me can look back at other times in my past when I was feeling stress or indecision and see that I made it through perfectly fine through that stressful time to this now present moment. Knowing this, how can there be any doubt that whatever I am going through now will turn out exactly as it needs to be.

So, it turns out I can time travel—but only to my past. I know we talk in spirituality about ‘being here now’ and living in the present…but I still think it would be pretty awesome to take a trip to the future. Anyone want to go there with me?