About Time and Travelling | Sourabh Raghavendra

The thought of having a time machine which lets you go back in the past at any point of time in your life and lets you to alter the course of some actions has always intrigued me.

Looking back on my life in this sense I have always realised myself relishing upon the complete emotional experience this endeavour brings. A sense of nostalgia, a feeling of having grown up and that of coming thus far, sensations of joy, sadness and shame arousing as a response to various good, bad and ugly memories, realisation of heavy weight of the burden I have been carrying all along- this blend of countless emotions, it does make me feel alive; but given then given the supernatural capacity to alter the course of action, whenever it has come down to it, I have always found myself being a little hesitant in doing so.

Among several reasons that would throw me in a quandary if it ever comes to that, the reason I am primarily concerned about is the very motivation that propels this imaginative endeavour within our mind. Motivation that makes us wish that if only I had done this differently or not done at all or done something instead of some other thing.

If we observe our actions without an attempt to judge them, we naturally come to realise that many of our actions are indeed a gamble. Gamble in a sense that we do not know what the outcome of our actions would be. We cannot win everything, every time and it is only when we lose something, depending upon how much the thing we lost meant to us, we begin to regret which begins with saying, “If only I knew…” Would we have acted the way we had acted if we knew the outcome already? Naturally we would have but the interesting thing here is that there is no way that we would come to know about all these outcomes.

And even if there indeed was ever a chance for us to go back and alter the course of action, it would most certainly have dissolved one of your regrets, but does it mean that altered course would bring no regrets that would come into existence as a part of consequence of that altered action? We don’t know that too! It would therefore be logical to assume that there exists a fair amount of probability that we might someday want to alter the course of already altered course of some original action!

The concept of time and action is fairly complicated than our apparent perception. We perceive entire world from a very small fragment of our own self. If only we could break out the chains of the ‘self’ and look at the world just the way world is, we realise that none of our regrets, reservations, remorse and resentments have any value subject to the flow of the time. It is just another event in the flow of time which happened except for a fact that the remarkable thing about the event was it made us sad and regret what happened. Whatever the regret and remorse we suffer is, therefore, needless to say, retrospective.

It thus naturally suggests that there is a substantial magnitude of probability which prompts that whatever I am doing right now, at this very moment holds a potential to make me wish to go back into the time say five or ten years down the line and alter my act just as much as those things that I did in the past make me do wish now; and if we realise this mechanism not only theoretically, but actually- it turns out to be one of the scariest yet an interesting facts about life.

There is no denying that even if we sit and do nothing, we are still travelling in the through the time and while we travel, we are not alone. We are travelling along with billions of people on earth, revolving around the sun along with other planets suspended in an ever expanding galaxy with infinitely many other galaxies in universe! Now the question is can we really ever go back into the time? Even if, for the sake of assumption, we can indeed go back to the time and change the course of our action, are we not changing course of entire universe? Let alone your own event, just imagine how many other events would turn out differently! The world will no longer remain the way it was. It would be a different world altogether and if it turns out worse than it ever was- will you not want to go back and change your action once again? And if you go back in the time again- once again- a totally different world you will get!

A clever counterargument to this proposition is that there fifty percent- equal chances that things may turn out better as there are those for things turning out worse, but then they were still there before we initially acted which apparently screwed things up.

There is no way we can completely take the charge of what happens to our life, what happens with our life and what happens because of our life. There is no way that the certain course of action would be the right course of action when we look at it from a perspective which elevates us beyond ourselves. There is just no perfect way for the things to happen and this is the reason why we say that none of us is perfect.

There is this obvious question then- what can we do? Can we, in fact, do something- at all?

If you ask me, I believe, yes. There is.

As it is the real trouble in our life lies in those thigs that never really leave our worried little mind. We worry because we do not know. Once we realise that there is absolutely no way we are going to know the outcome of our action, our decisions anyway- we realise there is no point worrying over something we don’t know.

Instead we can cherish what we know, who we are and the way we are. We can accept and reciprocate the love towards all those people who love us beyond everything. Once we realise that nothing in the world is ever binary, perfect we naturally stop giving hard time to ourselves expecting perfection in every situation and break ourselves out of the bubble of self-righteousness, stop seeing world as black and white.

All then that remains to it is what we naturally opt for. We opt to grow. Grow on our own and together. Once we realise this we find that it is not mere a coincidence that the natural tendency of any living organism is grow.

Coming back to the time machine- I always believe we are already time travellers. Though we are quite unable to travel back in the time, we are always capable of moving forward through the time. It’s just we have to do what we can do and just be!

That’s all that is to it I suppose.

- Sourabh Raghavendra.