Time travel

Why does this subject fascinate us so much?

In a bid to relax today I ran a deep bath and transferred the TV to the bathroom, once immersed I watched the last of the Terminator movies.

The truth is that although it is my day off where I reap the benefits of that early rise on every other morning, I do love compressed hours. However, my brain doesn’t recognise a Friday as being any different and decided that 6:30 was late enough to be asleep.  I harrumphed for a bit and then succumbed to the inevitable.

Rather than lie there rumbling around I took myself off to the gym. All was going well until number 20 of the reverse lifts and something went twang in my lower back. Keeping it stretching and working seemed to have been a good idea as it is not too tight now.

This was the real motivational factor behind the bath.

Half an hour of ice pack and an hour of hot water seems to have diffused the worst of the effects.

I have watched all of the Terminator movies over the years and it would be fair to say that the last one was the most confusing. How many possible outcomes can there yet be?

Unraveling the complexities of time travel is a mind bender that takes a whole lot of attention to detail, a bit like being a good liar you need to really remember the tiniest of nuances. That said I can suspend reality and enjoy most of the movies that deal with this subject.

There is a real attraction in being able to change the present by tweaking the past. I am not sure that it is something that I would realistically want to do, given that I do really love my wife and family, I love my kids and the house that we live in. Perhaps the financial choices of early working days could be drastically improved but there is the argument that each decision led to the next.

It is all pure conjecture anyway, but the voice of Dr Emmet Brown rings in the back of my head somewhere warning about messing with the space time continuum. Altering any one of the decisions that we have made could theoretically set us off on a completely different course which would end miles from where we now are. This maybe has some degree of appeal but arguably it could be disastrous.

If Terminator is any measure of the mess that is caused by such time travel maybe it is best left alone.

If I could time travel today I would stop at the 19th lift and my day would look quite different.

Ultimately as Harry Belafonte sang, “life is a road we pass but one way down.” For me, there is a comfort in believing that my steps are guided by the hand that holds the universe. This removes a lot of the potential angst and fear that would otherwise grip my heart in the midst of the mess that so often surrounds us.

On reflection,  I don’t think that I want to travel in time. It is a nice idea for a movie but there is nowhere that I really want to return to and the future is still mine to influence.