TimeLooping

TimeLooping

Most adults know what it means to be homesick. That sentimentality and yearning for a place where we felt loved and cared for. And its partner, what I call timesick. The same kind of sentimentality and yearning but for a time rather than a place. A time when we felt happy and productive. Needed. Purposeful.

In the world of psychology and neuroscience, both of these fall under the broader heading of “nostalgia,” and are normal, healthy states of mind with known neurological underpinnings. Nostalgia becomes a more frequent companion as we age and our memory banks are jampacked with people and experiences long gone.

In a related vein, Déjà vu is the sense of having been somewhere or done something before, as though it were recurring in the present but was pre-ordained in the past. Like a rubber band stretching across time and flicking us every so often with a glimpse of what’s to come.

Neuroscientists dismiss both nostalgia and déjà vu as different forms of brain glitch or brief malfunction. They can point to the exact brain regions involved.

But what about the feeling of literally being back in a different place, or different time?

In the 1980s, I was doing a lot of yoga and wanted to make yoga videos. “New Age” music was emerging and some of my favorite tunes were from Steven Halpern. I wrote to Mr. Halpern and asked if I could use his music as a background for a yoga video. He politely refused. I moved on to other New Age music artists that I still enjoy, and forgot all about Halpern.

Now, 40 years and two careers later, I finally have time to once again offer a yoga class and find myself looking for background music. Yesterday, at a Writing class, a stranger sitting next to me casually mentioned some new music she found online and really liked. I asked her to write the artist’s name in my notebook so I could follow up. She wrote, “Steven Halpern.”

In that microsecond, I felt like I was completing a loop that began four decades ago and has remained dangling in the background of my life. Like a flash of literally being there. For lack of a better word, a TimeLoop. I didn’t feel nostalgic, I just felt transported to that time stream in that three-dimensional moment, in my 1980s home, reading Steven Halpern’s letter and deciding I would find some other music. This time, he has some new music that I will use, with my iPhone and not needing his permission😊.

Did I TimeLoop around to the same moment, but now I can effect a different outcome? Or am I branching out of that TimeLoop to create a new one?

After we made our 8^th cross-country move in 30 years with much of our belongings jettisoned along the way, I unpacked a box of the few books that consistently “made the cut.” My husband spotted the distinctive cover of one and exclaimed, “I’ve been looking for that!” It was his book of daily Taoist meditation readings. We’d recently come through COVID-19 and two relocations, so he was delighted to resume a contemplative practice he had long since let go. He remarked, “It’s weird. Makes me feel like I’m back in Albuquerque in 1988. Not homesick. Just like I’m actually there. My whole body feels like I’m in our old living room again and you’re cooking in our old kitchen.”

My brother, a talented artist and composer (some of his artwork and his music can be enjoyed at: https://search.app/yQYBtBGqSp1BC3ZD7), told me last week that he was rummaging through boxes looking for something, and discovered compositions he wrote in high school. He dusted them off, updated and improved them, and posted them on his YouTube Website. He commented, “Seeing those pages of music I wrote as a teenager made me feel like I was literally back home in my room, composing.”

What strikes me about these three anecdotes is the insistence on all our parts that, Yes, we have nostalgia, and déjà vu, but this was not either of those. There was no bittersweet yearning or poignant sadness over days gone by.

It was like being abruptly yanked out of this time stream and plopped into another one. Reliving it as an old-new experience.

Is it possible we can bounce in and out of other time streams without getting stuck or creating one of those “time paradoxes” that doom most time-travel stories? Are those other time streams always happening in this moment like parallel paths hidden from our awareness until a freak hiccup catapults us into them for an instant?

After all, physicists now say that time is an illusion.

Just before his death in 1955, Einstein wrote, “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Physicists have been debating the implications of this notion ever since.

Meanwhile, neurologists explain away other inexplicable phenomena, such as out-of-body or near-death experiences, by yet again calling them brain glitches. The spasms of an overstressed neurological system or even an epileptic seizure.

But I think that can actually go both ways. Maybe a brain glitch causes my subjective feeling of a paranormal event, or a TimeLoop. On the other hand, maybe the paranormal event or the TimeLoop causes a brain glitch? Depends on how materialist or spiritualist we want to be . . .

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter whether the brain glitch or the TimeLoop comes first.

But it is oddly comforting to think that somewhere out there in the multitude of potential universes and dimensions, there are time streams we can dive into, take a quick swim, enjoy the eerie realness of it, and pop back out.

Where’s the harm? Has this happened to you? What did you make of it?