Good Morning! Before you say "thank God it's Friday", here are some thoughts on time to take you to the weekend. Time has often been the theme or plot of many stories and movies. Days repeating themselves, people living life
over again, people being born in the future etc. Time travel has been a very popular theme. Several
movies have been made involving the concept of traveling back or forward in
time. Often the plot involves the
futility of trying to change the future or the negative effects from trying to
change the past. This creates what could be called the “time paradox.” If you could go back and change things, then
why would you need to go back in the first place? Another dilemma time travel poses is how
anyone could be alive at two places at the same time. Inevitably, the person going back discovers
the futility of trying to change time.
In Déjà vu, Denzel Washington
was able to surmount the time paradox and successfully changed the future. Of course, it is not explained how he managed
to exist at two places at the same time, but the movie is very entertaining.
Some movies have dealt with the theme of “stuck in time” as
in the movie “Ground Hog Day.” In this
movie, the main character Phil (played by Bill Murray) is a weatherman assigned to cover Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, where every year a big
to-do is made about whether or not the ground hog comes out and sees its shadow. The outcome of this ritual is said to
determine how much longer winter will go on.
This year we were told that we will have two more weeks of winter although apparently there was a challenge from a competing groundhog somewhere else.
Phil is a disillusioned self-centered individual with a very cynical
outlook on life. By some stroke of fate, he finds that he keeps waking up and
reliving Groundhog Day over and over again. We surmise that he must keep
repeating the day until he is able to get it right. He must develop a likable and lovable
personality. The proof that he has changed lies in his ability to win the heart
of a local woman played by Andie MacDowell.
The character Phil is not only given a second and third but even gets a
fourth and fifth chance to live his life over again and to get it right.
Now you might think that Phil was lucky and you never get
such luck but you would be wrong. Each
day you get up, you have another chance to get it right. Each day is an opportunity for a new
beginning and a new start. You have to
make a choice. Will you keep doing the same things or will you change your
life. How often have you wished you could change the past or keep repeating it
until you got it right? What is one
thing you would like to go back into the past to change? What if you could change it? How would your life be different today? The choice is yours to make. The past is really always present.
Will you keep doing the same things or will you change your life. "How often have you wished you could change the past or keep repeating it until you got it right?"
ReplyDeleteThe religions of the East, Hinduism and Buddhism, take it as axiomatic that we will "keep repeating it until we get it right". Slowly, over an immense number of linked lifetimes, we learn our lessons and finally get to stop making mistakes. I keep going back to the question of what makes me me. The enlightened beings who have learned all their lessons (at least according to Hinduism) merge into the one true being, Brahman, and wake up from the illusion that they had been separate individuals. Take away all my habitual errors, my proneness to see things from a particular, inevitably biased perspective, and "I" disappear. If I could go back and change the past, then I would be a different person today.
Marge Piercy wrote a book some years ago called "Woman on the Edge of Time". It's a quite harrowing tale about a grossly abused and unloved woman, locked up in an asylum. She is visited by beings from the future and learns that she must disrupt experiments at the asylum involving psychoactive drugs to prevent a catastrophic future. She visits the future several times as she struggles with her task in the present. Each time she goes there, it is different depending on how well she is doing with the task.
What would I change? I do not know how events are linked. I am not confident that I could pick out one "good" change without adversely affecting other things. Since I am relatively content with the way my life has gone, I guess I'd play safe and leave things as they have been.
Sounds like a good read. Thanks for the suggestions Bruce. John
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