holiday letters and time travel
Sorting through the mail from the last month, there are lots of lovely cards with letters inserted — little one-page narratives recounting family adventures from the past year — and while I used to make fun of the annual holiday letter, I have really become a fan over recent years. These letters are like little time capsules. Capturing a thoughtful look back over the last year, they often are from proud parents, recounting activities, accomplishments and adventures of the children.
These letters make me think about how positioned we are in time and how tiny our little lives are in the vast arc of history. Temporality makes us human. Jerry Bruner talks about how we live through stories situated in the context ("once upon a time") of order and chronology. Looking back can be both comforting and unnerving; memories can steel our resolve to do better with whatever future resources we have available; recollecting the past allows us to grieve for what is lost; and a private retrospective opens up a space for regret, remorse and celebration (and sometimes all three at once).
I think it's why we love books and movies about time travel. It's the delicious speculation about what might have happened should we have not "just missed" that flight, or had we chosen to move to Des Moines instead of Dayton, or if we had turned that fling with the Brazilian guy into a full-fledged relationship. When I looked into graduate schools over twenty years ago, I applied to and was accepted into Berkeley and NYU. Berkeley was ever-so-much more convenient because it was closer to Salt Lake City where I lived at the time. The Bay Area climate is temperate. I was born in San Diego and I have a fundamentally western sensibility. Tuition was more sensible there (barely). A built-in community of friends awaited me on the west coast. But I took a face-first flyer into New York City and my life has been forever altered.
The butterfly effect, an expression named for a speculation about the weather — the flutter of a butterfly's wing potentially leads to a storm in another part of the world — has come to describe the enormous impact any tiny shift one action can have on the future. It often freights my consciousness about daily behavior. I'm still muddling around the edges of the impact we have on other people, apparently. Read about Fig's new alarm clock on Kickstarter, which greets you with several key bits of information, including how many days you have left to live, based on your lifestyle and actuarial charts. Stark confrontation of the reality of your own limited time on the planet is meant to motivate you to a more meaningful use of what you have. While I'm not sure I could bear to confront this much reality upon rising every morning, it's a worthy notion to play with. Mary Oliver, my beloved favorite poet, asks it differently in The Summer Day, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
So. Welcome to 2014. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious year? And on a more frivolous and infinitely more manageable note, what is your favorite time travel book or movie?
