Playing tricks with time…

It’s late here. Just coming up for midnight. So really, I should have posted before now… posted earlier. However, I’m consoling myself with the thought that it’s actually only 11pm back in the UK. So, if I pretend that I’m back home, this post will still be published today. 

I’m playing tricks with time…

A couple of days ago, I wrote about giving gifts to our future self, and receiving gifts from our past selves. I was circling this specifically from the place of tending to our sense of wellbeing and to our creative practice. However, since then, this idea of exchanges between past, present and future selves seems to be stalking me.

I watched an old episode of Chef’s Table the other night there, and towards the end, the chef looks at the camera and says, ‘If you’re thinking of a problem you can solve in this lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.’ Hmm… I thought. The present self giving a gift to a future that will only exist long after their death.

This then came up in conversation with my dad when he told me what he’s doing now is planting acorns – seeding ideas and visions and stories and ways of seeing the world that won’t bear fruit in his lifetime, but will continue to make a positive contribution to his grandchildren’s children.

And then I picked up a novel to read from the bookshelf in my bedroom here: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Clare North. I realise as I read the first few chapters that it’s about a man who lives the same life over and over again. Each time he dies, he is born again in the same moment as he was born before – except with all his memories from his previous life in tact. I’ve yet to discover where this story goes, but the concept intrigues me. Not least because it seems to chime with this communication over a lifetime, and over lifetimes. 

In fact, it makes me think of the movie Arrival. Have you seen it? I think it is quite possibly the most intriguing, thoughtful, brilliant movie I’ve seen for a long time. At the end, I felt like a different person – like I’d been fundamentally changed in the the time it took to watch it from beginning to end. It too is about the chronology of consciousness – the ways in which we perceive time – past, present, future. I don’t want to give too much away about the movie as it really needs to be seen without spoilers, I think. But yes… this interplay across time is fascinating to me right now. 

So, as I sit here typing in France, it is now just after midnight. But I’ll pretend, for the moment, that I’m still in Scotland and that it’s just past 11. It’s still today, and tomorrow is just around the corner. Playing tricks with time and whispering words across the border between now and then and soon.