udiobooks made it possible to commute all the way to Silver Spring and stay sane. The best of them can be engrossing, sometimes dangerously so. I was listening to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, read by the author (or by his computer-generated voice), and at one point I got so caught up in the narrative that I ran off the road. I was on the beltway at the time, so this could have ended badly! Luckily it didn’t, and I righted myself and continued home.
It wasn’t just me, it was the book. Kathleen told me that she was listening to the same audiobook on the way to her teaching job, and she was concentrating on it so hard that she ran off the road (again, luckily, with no permanent consequences).
Stephen Hawking suggested in his book that if you allow for the possibility of imaginary time (time measured in imaginary numbers), our universe’s entire history can be described as a higher-dimension sphere with no endpoints, rather than a time “line”. (Apologies for my crude paraphrasing. His concepts are hard for me to describe or even understand, especially while navigating a car at 60 miles per hour.)
The book was mostly beyond me, but it left me with a sense of wonder at the ways of the universe and the human mind. What if time wasn’t an arrow with a beginning and an end, but a circle?
* * *
I’ve had my own direct experiences with imaginary time, and I can confirm that it can travel in a circle. Many of you, I suspect, have experienced time circles of your own, and it’s got little to do with physics or metaphysics.
I’ll describe two time circles, one with a diameter of about 40 years, and one of about 20 years.
I entered the first time circle when I was about six or seven years old, so it was 1960 or 1961. I had recently learned about how years work, and someone told me about the end of the century coming in about 40 years, when the odometer would click over from year 1999 to year 2000. I was fascinated by the idea, and I tried to imagine what that would be like. I tried to imagine what I would be like. I would be 45 or 46 years old, so a grownup, like my teacher or my parents. Maybe I’d be a parent myself. I might wear a suit and tie and have a crew cut and wear glasses. I tried to picture what I might look like, and imagine how I would feel, and “be”, as an adult. This imagination game went on for several days, until my mind was distracted by some new thought, and eventually I forgot about it.
My life progressed, in ways both predictable and suprising, and eventually I found myself in the year 2000. The memory of the young me picturing his 46-year-old self came pouring back. I pictured myself at six, and I remembered what it was like to be six, picturing me at 46.
My memory of the young me was spotty, and much of what I had imagined back then didn’t come to pass (no crew cut!). So neither old me nor young me was too spot on about what the other was like, but after 40 years I was still as much me as I was back then, despite the missed predictions and lost memories. I felt as if a vast circuit had been completed, and I had come back to where I started. I mentally smiled at my young self and wished him well on his future, as he congratulated me on my past. (Regular readers will know I can be smug. This started, apparently, at quite a young age.)
* * *
The second time circle started about 20 years ago. I was transitioning jobs, and had found what seemed like a good opportunity with the Navy out in Port Hueneme, California, when I got a call from my daughter. “Guess what Dad, I’m pregnant!” She and her husband were living in northern Virginia, so the prospect of moving anywhere away from the mid-Atlantic area immediately lost its allure. I had a daydream that was startling (for me) for its power and clarity. Some day, I imagined, I’d be leaning on the railing of the deck at my house with my 20-year-old grandson as the sun went down, and we’d be drinking some beers and yakking about the kind of stuff families yakked about–cars, girls, jobs, whatever.
Unlike the memory from my first time circle, this one stayed near the surface, and every now and then I’d take it out and savor it. Our daughter had a boy, who was bright, loving and happy. At about three years old, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. We all knew that from then on, his life would take different turns than it otherwise would have, and I quietly stored my daydream away as something that might have been.
With the love and support of his parents, he grew up a good person, mostly healthy and mostly happy, as we hope all children will be. He sees the world differently than I do, but as I watched him mature, I saw the universal human condition as he learned who he was and how he fit in the world, and in all his struggles and triumphs.
He’s about twenty now, and earlier this year he had come over to spend a few days with us and help out with some house cleaning chores. It was hard work, but the days were pleasant and the evenings watching the sunset light up the other shore of the Chesapeake Bay were magical. He had developed an intense interest in automobiles and machinery, and we were on the deck relaxing and discussing the pros and cons of new and older engine models, and my daydream came bursting into my consciousness! We were drinking sodas, not beers (had I thought about it when creating the daydream, I would have realized that even back then the drinking age was 21), but in every important way, this was the closure of that mental circuit I had created twenty years earlier. I nearly cried.
The second time circle started shortly before the first one had completed, and I like to think of them as forming two links in a time “chain” that describes my life. I like this idea because it implies that I’m now in a third time circle, and someday I will be surprised and delighted to be brought back to something from my past. I think about the future like everyone does, I guess, and I don’t have any idea which of my forward thoughts might be the basis for the next link in my time chain, but just knowing the circle might be forming around me even now makes the present a little lighter, and the future a little more worth reaching for.
Thanks for listening, from me and from younger me.
Dorn
5 October 2019, 1999, and 1960
