8/24/11

Time Walking Report: Relativity


Thinking. It usually happens when I’m trying to sleep, or when I’m in the shower and don’t have anywhere to write down my ideas. I started using a dry erase marker on the shower wall for a while, but soon discovered that dry erase markers are meant to stay dry in order to erase.

This particular thinking session I was in the bathtub, shaving my legs and pondering relativity. You know, the gravity and space and time stuff. That maybe the earth’s gravitational pull would prevent me from time walking into space. Not true. The first time my husband kissed me, it shot me past the moon. I didn’t come back for three weeks, and when I did, I found out I was in love. Permanently. No erasing.

There are a few theories out there that the brilliant, highly educated physicists may have wrong. For example, some think time travel to the future would be easier than time travel to the past. I’m not so sure about that, so I tested it out. Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel Foundation took me so far into the future, the planet earth is practically myth. Funny though, the people 10,000 years from now had a lot of the same problems we do. Only more of them because there were a quadrillion people living all over the galaxy. So I don’t think time travelling to the future was easier at all. In fact, it’s hard to see the future and find out we still make the same mistakes.

Here and now, though, we can try to do better. So I time walked to Pakistan and gave a group of women a loan so they could start a rope-making business. I wanted to go borrow money from Future Me who is a successful writer, but I couldn't find the path. It will be there someday, but for now, I decided to give what Today Me could. Twenty five dollars to Kiva.org isn’t much in my world. But in the world these women live in, it's a lot.


Relativity. Maybe I just changed the future. I told you I could time walk. I bet you can, too.

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