Time Travel

Thoughts on the past:

Sometimes I wish I could travel back in time. But I don't know what I would do, really. Laugh at the same jokes again. Look at my favorite faces again. Stand there, awkwardly, thinking to myself "Do other people know about this?!" the whole time. It's hard to predict.

Thoughts on the future:

Last week I listened to a Harvard psychology professor talk about findings comparing two cognitive tasks: 1) projecting oneself into "others' shoes" and 2) thinking about oneself in the future. Results: both tasks engage basically the same areas of the brain. One could say that we tend to see the projection of our "future self" as a different person--our biology leaves us with only hypothetical inferences into our future mental states.

Thoughts on the present:

In high school I remember being brave, strong, and the envy of all nations. With fresh thoughts, I took my first tiptoed steps across hot coals, arms clenched full of beautifully folded origami dreams. I am only one thought in one place in one moment, a worm eating and pooping soil underneath a divine orchestra. I cannot seize my future and am, at a worm's pace, realizing that I would not wish my future into my fickle and fleshly hands to be carried upon frail, bared feet, blistered in the summer heat, bitten by the frosty night. Is this a mindset derived from failure? Maybe. There are the moments I imagine what it might be like to be a genius--to succeed in whatever endeavor one undertakes simply due to blessed neural networks, maybe from the perfect combination of childhood conditions and inherited genetic sequences. And maybe here I should say something eloquent about how failure teaches perseverance and humility, and in doing so fashions stronger men, more affectionate women, and inculcates deeper empathy for fellow humans. The truth is I long for perfection in all my strivings, which only succeeds in giving me a keen sense of my own imperfection in all my strivings. So, if ever presented with the hypothetical choice, I would choose to be better than what I am, in art, in music, in writing, in science, in muscle mass, in empathy, in skin color, in smell. Would this make the path to the future an easier one? I don't know. I'm tired of thinking hypothetically--it opens up endless, useless divergences.

Perspectives:

The point is that there is Freedom in the Moment that I am, a Freedom to choose the eyes I will use, a Perspective to utilize and, at times, share. My arsenal is the perpetual culmination of past experiences--failures, accomplishments, passions, attitudes, weaknesses, ideas, mindsets, knowledge of the world. Contrary to what I believed when I used to sit in pews as a kid, the world from a distance is gray, not black and white. I think the blackness and whiteness is at a much more implicit level than what one individual mind can observe, which happens to render most judgements about the motives of neighbors inane and obsolete. A good lesson here would be: Just don't do it, ever. There are so many other more useful things to use one's brain for. Where do the gray shades come from though? I think there are good perspectives and bad perspectives in the Moment one owns. Bad perspective: Why the hell does everyone and everything in the world exist to make my life miserable? Good perspective: Cool. It's a nice day. There might be more, but they are all probably just derivations of these two.