It seems I have heard or read a dozen times the (probably misquoted) Hawking quote, “If in the future, we have mastered time travel, than where are all the time travelers?”
Whether or not Hawking said this, or some version of this, is even less relevant than today's (entirely meant to provoke) title. The real question is not, “Is time travel possible?” But rather, “What is time?”
“Is there really a witching hour?” Faith asks. She is six years old, strong-willed as an ox, tough as nails, and likes to use words like “teleport,” “supposedly,” and “actually.” She asks pointed questions that are framed around her real thoughts (which she only reveals after she has processed the answers) and devises new questions from the nuances of any response. Five times a day I wish she were my daughter. Six times on Sundays.
Of course, Faith (named after the vampire slayer... or the power of belief... her parents disagree on which) has already ascertained that there is no hour when witches and other creatures roam the mortal realm with malice toward the mundane world. She's asking for the historical context, an explanation for why in heaven and Earth such a spooky name like Witching Name ever came to be. She wonders, her little hands on her hips, did the Witching Hour creatures go extinct? And if so, is there a guide book with drawings of orc, eld, goblin and witch fossils?
It all returns to time. Was there a time – a time that is not this time now – when midnight was different? Then. Now. Time is a magical construct – man-made, man-honed. Time is the gearwork veneer of our existence. We know it has no baring, that it is a self-defeating design, fickle to our plights. We have all the time in the world. We're running out of time. Time flies. Time stops. Time is a straight line, an arrow, a ray of light (even they bend)...
Time is a blanket, warm and heavy, wrapped around our shoulders against cold winter. Time to a force. It is a song we hear to comfort ourselves. It is a tool we use to measure when a ruler won't do. Interestingly enough, both time and the straight line are mad-made.
Time is not real. Existence is real. But tick tocks are just life, forced into heart-shaped muffin tins. The sun rises and sets. The Earth spins. None of that is time.
So let's argue that time is a gift from God. A thing of nature instead not the thing that we all normally accept, the man-made thing. Let's argue that time is nonlinear (God didn't make any straight lines) and that traveling God's time is logical and instinctual. Effortless. We can go back to any point. We can even go forward, if we are still enough for the journey. What if all the gray matter in our brains is simply storage space for time travel? Blank disk space on which to burn a massive collection (though not infinite) of time traveling maps. What if memory – triggered by sensation – is time?
What do people remember, what did they see, that they named it the Witching Hour? That is what little Faith is actually asking. And when her brother says, upon stepping outside and smelling the fresh sea on the wind, “I see La Push.” he doesn't mean he can suddenly see 100 miles through forest and mountains to the ocean, but rather that the scent of the nearby Puget Sound has triggered his time travel map and he is teleported to the place he loves. And the flood of memories from that place becomes his time travel adventure. In that moment, with the key turned on, he has access to memories of his special place that he didn't have before he stepped into the sea-rich wind.
My good friend, Ninja, says to me one evening: I was just taking a shower. Nice long one. Relaxing. You know how showers are. But... but suddenly everything changed. The lateness of the night, the hotness of the water, the still-silence of the house... I was back *there.* I was with *him.* It was bad. I was alone. I was certain if I stepped out of the shower I would be stepping out into *that* place... that time.
Because time is part of us. Nature. And sometimes nature does horrible things.
It may take practice to time travel, to access those maps in your brain. It may be so easy it happens forty times a day. Every traveler is different. The places you go may be joyous. They may be dark. I know that I have both. Sometimes I even go back to places that make me blush or that embarrass me or that fill me, like my Ninja, with dread and fear. But always I relish these places. Every one of them... even the one where, standing over me, they said: She's gone. She's not here.
Even the one where you told me you loved me in French and I thought you said, “I like you very much.”
The thing with time travel is that we can't always control it. The triggers, the keys, might be any of our senses... or even things we can determine. But here's a secret from on traveler to the next. Once we recognize what this is – a gift from God – we can shape it. We can associate new maps with triggers.... we can burn over old maps, save over those paths and rewrite the destination. It can be done.
Just think of Christ as a perfect tool. That awesome indelible pen that can write over anything... and yet, on the end? There's a great big eraser, too. Tr easure the places you love. Visit those locales often and write travel logs of your adventures -- old and new. Explore new ideas that come from each visit. And as for those cities you don't care for so much? Remove them from the itinerary.
A fellow traveler,
EJ
