Fiction: ‘Time Machine’

If you think about it, we are nothing more and nothing less than living, breathing time machines. The past only exists in our minds, rooted down in our collective memories.

As a result, we can go back whenever we want.

We can travel through time to relive any moment from our past in the blink of an eye; the only restriction is that we can’t change anything. Maybe that’s the universe’s way of preserving the human timeline. We have been given the gift of time travel under the strict condition that we don’t alter the course of our history.

We can only observe and learn.

But this ability to look back with any kind of clarity can be as much a curse as it is a gift. As sweet as it can be to relive our happiest memories, it can be just as bitter to dwell upon lost chances, painful mistakes and regretted words. The only way to move forward is to remember that we are not a one way time machine.

And the key lies in our memories.

By remembering our past, we can forge our future.

As long as we have our imagination and are willing to act upon what we’ve learnt, we can travel into a future of our own design. Unlike the past, the future is malleable. By tapping into that hidden drive that smoulders deep within all of us, we can bend the future to our will and create the lives we imagined long ago when we were still very young.

There’s no limit to our creativity.

When you think of the days ahead, you’re unknowingly travelling into the future. The image may be blurred, but it’s still accessible to us if we learn from the past, take hold of the present, and work towards what we have seen. We have the ability to breathe new life into our dreams.

It’s not as hard as we have built it up to be.

That’s just a trick our brains play.

Our minds are the most complex creations in the known universe, and they’re a mystery, even to us. We have more abilities than we realise. The only thing we can be truly sure of is that time machines are not a feat of engineering from the world of science fiction and pop culture.

And time is not beyond our reach.

It is who we are, and who we always were.

 ~ Ekaterina