Timedancer.

“ My past holds only pain and loss. I will conquer it by creating the perfect future.” -Ixidor, reality sculptor.

If I had a time machine, would you rather travel to the past or to the future?

If I had a time machine, I’d stay where I am.

I know I’m not answering the question as it is asked, but it is the only answer in my heart.

Why forwards? Why not go back into the past to correct my mistakes? To make it complete, to make up for my shortcomings, somehow.

Like everyone I know, I’ve toyed with the idea of going back in time and fixing things. Yes, I’ve had regrets. I’ve known sorrow and faced catastrophe and come out worse more than once. But yet knowing I’ve made the mistakes, knowing I’m not perfect is more important than going back and making it better.

Making it better. The words are sweet on the tongue, but like bitter chocolate, it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste, and a guilty feeling in the pits of your conciousness. Going back to the past and changing things might not make it better. I am, after all, human, and changing events will never produce the desired result. All that I will accomplish is making myself feel better. Changing something in my past means I have not come to grips with the consequences. Why waste your life on false security?

We can never go forwards if we only think of changing the past. We must look forward, raise our heads to the sky and embrace the darkness, instead of looking back and wishing the sun had never set.

Why not go into the future then? After all this talk of looking forward, it seems like that must be the answer.

But I feel that I AM going into the future. Every single minute of the day, every grain of sand passing through the hourglass, I am going into the future. I don’t need a time machine to do that. And to me, going many years into the future is worse than going into the past.

It might sate my curiousity for a while, but then I’d feel out of place. All the things and places and people I’ve known are gone, or if not gone, changed. And I’ve missed years of my life, years which might be spent with them, growing with them, enjoying each other’s company. In my opinion, that’s more important than finding out what’s a few years in the future. And what of my new found knowledge? Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. The temptations would gnaw at me, daily, to use this knowledge for my own gain and others’ expense. Even if I do not succumb, the constant conflicts would drive me insane. And even if I travel into the future, I would grow at the same rate as in the present. A minute in the future I trade for a moment in the present. And it’s not worth it.

I believe we were meant to live each moment as it comes. We were meant to learn and live in the present. We were not meant to cheat death by travelling into the future, we were not meant to be able to tailor our past and future reality to suit our whims.

I choose to remain in the present, where I can make my own small difference at in my own time, where my time is my own, where I can live knowing that I can change my future by accepting my past. Like I was meant to.