Has your timeline ever folded in on itself?
Sometimes it happens in dreams, when you’re transported to another place and time but as your current self.
Sometimes it happens in real life, when you visit a place you used to be, or meet somebody you used to know, and it’s as though no time has passed at all.
…But it has. And you have. And nothing is ever exactly the same.
I’ll never forget the couple I met on a train once when I lived in Japan. They had lived for a while in Japan 20 years prior, and returned to visit their former one-time home.
“Never go back to a place after 20 years,” the woman said to me, with haunted eyes. It was not the same. She expected to step into the memories from her past as if into a painting. But the timeline did not fold in on itself for her. The dissonance disturbed her.
That’s the problem, and also the joy, with travel. You can visit the same place again, but you’ll never get the same combination of place + people + time + self. Those moments can never replicated.
Usually, we are beings trapped in linear time. We can’t go backwards, only #alwaysforward. The past is always a part of us, for better or worse, but until we invent time travel we can never go back, not really. We are always flowing towards the future, but we can’t get there any faster either. We are inescapably bound to the present.
But sometimes, the timeline folds in on itself for a moment. Is this fate giving us a chance at a different path? Or trying to teach us something (Ghost of Christmas Past style)? Or simply a random glitch in the matrix? I wish I knew.
Philosophers have tried for eons to make sense of time, in my opinion to no avail. (Heidegger anyone?)
“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”
-Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
(Cool that totally clears things up, thanks Heidegger 😵💫😂)
So I’m not going to solve the mystery of time in an evening, obviously. But it’s fun to think about nonetheless.
Have you ever felt your timeline fold in on itself, even for a moment?
Breaking Moulds 
Methinks Martin Heidegger made the English language fold in on itself with that quote.
🤣 So true.
Now this is fascinating to think about. And yeah, I have experienced it. From both ends: sometimes standing still and thinking I can maybe feel my future selves moving past me in a place. Or so I’ve hoped.