Can the past be fixed?
I always find surprising when I realize how malleable Time seems to be some times.
Even though it’s supposed to be a fixed thing with the same exact quantity of minutes in every hour, in some occasions Time appears to be so elastic that allows some minutes to feel longer and some other to feel shorter.
That also makes me think about how some things in our life are missed while we’re too busy doing other things. Then, when time passes by, we can’t help wonder “where did the time has gone?”
Watching a TV series the other day, called Third Watch, this phrase caught my attention when a policeman tells a friend “I’ve spent 25 years of my life in this game and nobody even told me I was playing.”
That made me remember this singular feeling that appears when we recover consciousness of our life after having been too busy, and then we realized all what we have missed during that period. This situation reminds me of a movie called Somewhere in time, because it reflects in a very precise way this feeling that an important part of our lives had got lost “somewhere in time”.
This movie, stared by Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, is based on a novel called Bid Time Return, written by Richard Matheson, and it’s called in Spanish “Pidele al tiempo que vuelva” (Ask for the time to come back), which I think it also applies very well to this suffocating feeling that appears every time that we missed something important and we wish we could go back in time and re-do those missing things.
May be this is one of the reasons why we can find so many books and TV series in which the main topic it the search for a device that allow us to travel in time. But then the question always remains, is it really possible to change our past? Or are we condemned to live with it, just as General Kirk, from The Time Tunnel TV Series, said: “The past is something that we cannot change and we have to learn how to live with it”?
