Time Travel

Earlier this week I heard a commentary on time travel.  In it the commentator remarked that most time travelers seek to go back in time; going backward, she said, creates a host of challenges that nothing can be done to change history.  One of my favorite rom-com films is Kate and Leopold, and in that film Kate is charged with time traveling to enable history.  If she doesn't go back and marry Leopold, then their children and grandchildren won't exist and can't accomplish the things that history tells us that they have accomplished.

Going forward in time could be easier since we don't have to worry about upsetting history, but what we are stepping into is of necessity much more mysterious and possibly problematic. I will write more about forward time travel tomorrow.

This weekend several media accounts have marked the 45th anniversary of the Lunar Landing of Apollo 11.  The stories have made me a bit nostalgic and wishing just a bit that I could time travel.  I don't want to be overly idyllic about the late 60s and early 70s because there was a lot of turmoil, but there was also a sense of hope in this country that has steadily dwindled since that time. 

As I recall my big eyes as a young person, glued to the television joining the rest of the country (maybe the world) in watching the landing on the moon, I believe I thought there was nothing we couldn't accomplish.  The Greatest Generation, who had won World War II, was still relatively young, and they'd come home to change the world on the home front as they had in Europe and Asia.

We had a civil rights law that meant, as a young woman, I could pursue careers that had only been open to women previously when the men were at war.  President Nixon had declared war on cancer, and little could we know that what then was a certain death sentence would by now, in many cases, become a chronic or curable condition.  The end of the 1967 war in the Middle East left us hopeful for peace in the region.

So, if I chose to travel backward in time, it would be to this day 45 years ago.  I wouldn't want to change anything but to just experience that sense of hopefulness again.  To remember on a cellular level what it felt like to think there wasn't anything either I or we collectively couldn't accomplish if we put our heads, hearts, and intention to it.