Time Travel and Life Changing Advice

Hola, non-existent readers. It's been about a million years since I've posted on here so I'm pretty sure the only people who might end up reading this are random google searchers looking for the new release of the movie based on the book below, and myself, of course (gotta be your own biggest fan). But its all good. Hey, at least I'm writing something so that years later I can come back and read my own thoughts about time travel. Sweet.

I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. My friend told me she cried almost the entire last 100 pages. Based on this, others told me I would surely cry throughout the entire thing, due to my highly emotional nature. I agreed that this prediction was likely and took no bets against it, yet I only shed a few tears on one page, thank you very much. Who's overly emotional now?

Anyway, I'm not here to spoil the book. I will rate it as a entertaining and engaging, yet long read that was worth my time for sure, but was far from being my favorite book. There were parts that didn't really ring true to me (no, not the time traveling parts, parts that really could be true, but I didn't like how they were thrown in). However, I can't go in more detail without having to put forth a spoiler alert. Besides, I would rather discuss a very obvious aspect of the book... Time travel (duh).

For one reason or another (insomnia, most likely), I finished the book and decided to crack open some of my old journals. In addition to the very sporadic documentation of my life in this blog, I also write about more private matters in various journals, and 5 of them happen to live here with me in Philly (6 if you count my Travel Journal). I can't really focus very well (a topic for another day if I ever get around to it) so my journals tend to jump around a lot. You might need to go to the black one with pink roses on it for a mid-college assessment of how school and grades and classes are going, yet to my green journal, which tends to have more quotes and random writings in it for a hand copied version of a quote I really enjoyed just a week later. Lets just say if you wanted to actually track my thoughts and emotions over time in a semi-coherent way (whether thats even possible is up for debate) you would have to go on quite a scavenger hunt through my various writings.

Whatever the reason my random mind had for going through and reading older thoughts, it got me thinking about what time travel would really mean. As I read through a journal entry from April 27, 2004 (at 3:14am, noting the consistency in my insomnia, as I write this at 1:43am), writing fervently about grades and the possibility of getting my second 4.0 for the spring semester, I wondered to myself. What would I tell myself if I really could travel back in time and speak to this younger me? Would I give myself advice (chill the **ck out)? Would I inform myself of which people are worth my time and which I should drop like a hot plate? And what if I could visit myself in the future and find out where life will take me, as Henry DeTamble of the book could? Would I even want to?

The characters in the book shed some light onto answers such as this. Especially for future travel. Henry tried to avoid giving away details of the future to his wife and others in his life unless absolutely necessary. But sometimes, these details provided reassurance (e.g., reassurance that their unrelenting efforts to achieve certain goals were finally realized and not in vain) and helped them avoid unnecessary worry for the future. However, other times, it reduced the excitement or increased feelings of helplessness for the inevitable.

As for giving yourself advice, that is a question that important to ask regardless of its impossibility. Surely, I would love to give my adolescent self some hard hitting advice, something along the lines of 'live it up while you have few responsibilities, but stay away from assholes named XXXXX.' But would I really have listened? And how would that change who I am today? Could I still be as empathic for others who made dumb mistakes like or similar to mine? Would I still be in the field I am in? I'm not sure... but I kind of doubt it.

A wise man once told me he believes that we each bring into our lives things we somehow want and need at that time. This doesn't sit well with everyone, yet there still seems to be some underlying truth to it. Everything has some type of purpose, right? So who am I, or any other fictionally time traveling being, to mess with that purpose? I guess I'll have to settle with giving my present-self advice based on my past mistakes just like all the other non-time traveling folk. I guess its been working pretty decently so far, and I expect I will only get better at it as time goes on.