Have you ever looked closely at a world map with time zones? It’s not laid out as uniformly as one might expect. Many lines more closely resemble gerrymandering than easy to follow boundaries.
So what does time zones have to do with time travel?
Wherever you are in the world, you can move forward or backwards in time in a plane, car or in your head. There are more times zones that exist in my mind than any map holds. And that means I can take myself time traveling at any given moment.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because my mind has been taking me time traveling far too often. Does that happen to you?
Whether it’s a meeting at work, walking down the street, talking on the phone or driving my car, I find myself completely absorbed by past and future life events, paying minimal attention to what’s around me. I find myself snapping back into the present moment when I realize I’ve gone someplace else with my thoughts.
There’s nothing wrong with mental time travel, as long as it’s intentional.
Intentional time travel is a good thing. It’s how we better understand our past experiences and plan for our future.
The thinking brain has a way of generating thoughts, plans and realities that neither resemble the truth nor help me live the life that is right in front of me. Possibilities and probabilities of their happening seem largely irrelevant. They are not bothered by distorting truth or representing any semblance of reality. Does that happen to you?
Most of the time when I’m spinning possible scenarios of what might happen in a future event not only does it never happen, but what I’m worrying about what someone might say or do is not even close to what happens. Unplanned time travel does not help me the way intentionally thinking about what a future event might be like and how I should prepare for it.
The less aware I am of mental time jumping, the more I miss living in the current time zone. I can’t recapture the present moment that went by. It’s a dynamic, freewheeling and interconnecting experience that offers much more than mental time travel ever will.
It’s startling how the awareness of the back and forth movement through time wakes me up to the moment I’m really living. The more I catch myself unintentionally time traveling I’m creating a way of thinking that keeps me living in the now.
The experience and clarity that is found fully living in the right now makes the future and future past all the richer.
Our greatest experiences and lives are lived in the moment.
Do you find yourself unconsciously captive to other time zones? Are there times that it happens more often? How do you maximize experiencing what’s going on right in front of you?
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