Like silly putty, the mind and its precious imagination are capable of being stretched. In fact, just this week, I caught an episode of Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking about time travel. Yes, I’m a big geek – but Hawking’s genius and creativity stretched my imagination to its limits.
Hawking explained that time travel isn’t only possible, it happens all around us – every day. Time is relative; the speed at which time unfolds is impacted by both mass and speed. Heavy things, like the Earth, make time slow down. Really heavy things, like black holes, make time even slower. Similarly, speed slows down time, too. If we had a vessel that approached the speed of light, the occupants in the ship would experience time much slower than those earthlings back home.
All this talk about time travel got me thinking. I don’t need a time machine. I still don’t even fully appreciate the main course that is this present moment – the last thing I need to do is jump on a spaceship and skip to dessert.
But wait! On second thought, even if I did land a ticket to future Earth, there would still only be the ever-eternal now. My now would just be a different now than if I had stayed back home. In this way, it’s never really possible to escape the present moment and truly experience the future. There is always only this moment – skipping to dessert, to extend my misguided metaphor, isn’t really possible.
There’s a reason why you cannot escape the present moment: time isn’t real. Clocks are. We’ve come to rely on time so heavily since birth, it feels real. But I can promise you that it isn’t.
There is no past or future; there is only now.
(Honestly....what would this post be without a throw back to the 80s? Enjoy the video below.)
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