Time Travel Is Easy

I time travel all the time. For those of you who know me, no, I am not micro-dosing again and getting the doses wrong. I mean meditation, and how easily it puts you into a time that has already passed, and sometimes one that hasn't happened yet.

Memory is unreliable. When you remember something in ordinary life, I think you mostly see a version of the last time you remembered it, adjusted a little each pass, rather than the event itself. In meditation, a different memory surfaces. You watch it as an observer instead of from behind your own eyes, and what you see is not always flattering.

Memories are a bastardization of the good and the bad.

I try to do it every morning, before anything else. It took a shock to get me back to it, even though I was trained in Transcendental Meditation years ago.

• • •

Over the course of one month, four people came back into my life out of nowhere. Each of them someone I had a real connection with at some point. Each of them ended. All four reappeared inside the same few weeks.

When something ends for me, it is over. The end is the moment I decide, enough, time to move on. That moment may look very different to the other person. Either way, I go, and I do not usually look back.

So it was fascinating to watch how differently they arrived. Two came to tell me about the things I did badly. They were not wrong. I knew what I had done, and I got the chance to say so. The other two did not want to vent. They wanted to catch up. What they really wanted was to feel the way they felt during our time.

The last of them wanted to go back to when we were happy. Not to talk about it, to live in it again. She had spent the pandemic in Paris, where we met years earlier, and she wanted to feel connected to someone familiar. I understood it. But you cannot time travel in reality. All you get are memories, and memories are not a realistic picture of who either of you were.

State of mind is exactly that. A state. You can change it whenever you decide to.

Over eighteen months of regression work, I have started to understand the periods where things went wrong and why. When I drift toward narcissism, the lows follow. When I lean empath, the highs do. Knowing that makes projecting forward much simpler, because you are finally starting from an honest place.

But it requires the hardest question there is, asked in front of a mirror: am I ready to see the unvarnished truth about myself? Am I really?

Most people see themselves as who they think they are, while everyone around them sees something quite different. I am lucky to be living with my youngest son, who is relentless about evaluating his own being. I never fully appreciated how smart he is. I am teaching him to time travel. It is a skill anyone should learn who wants to improve who they are to themselves.

At this time of year it is easy to feel sad, or grateful, or nothing at all under a pile of activity. If you really want to know how you feel, go back in time.

Paul Harkins