About time

It never fails to amaze me how many films there are on time travel. Time travel has long held a fascination for many of us. Apparently, even famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking believes humans are capable of time travel into the future. There are at least 150 well known short stories and novels dating back to 1733 about time travel. As for television series on time travel, early recollections go way back to 1951 where Scientist Captain Z-Ro,  had a time machine, the ZX-99, both to view history and to send someone back in time.

Popular movies on time travel include Back to the Future,  Groundhog day, The Lake House, The Time Traveller’s Wife and recently About Time. The main thrusts? Reliving past events, returning to yesterday and even the possibility of changing what had been.

Then I ask myself if ever I am confronted with such a possibility, would I do it?

To satiate my curiosity I would certainly like to see how Van Gogh painted his sunflowers, how Beethoven composed the 5^th Symphony or how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Nearer home, I would like to see how my parents lived as children. Maybe I would like to see again all the good stuff that happened to me in the past. I would like to see what would have happened if my life choices were different: careers, relationships, ambitions, values. But I certainly would not like to travel into the future because I am not brave enough to see unfavourable events unfold, especially if they concern the people that I care for.

The possibility of ‘altering’ the sequence of events is also very tempting. Just imagine that I had done something totally awkward and because of that one incident, my whole life had been ruined. Or I had uttered one wrong thing and lost my good friend in the process.  Unkind words, like feathers tossed from a roof, float everywhere and cannot be gathered back. How simple it would be to travel back in time and undo what I had done.

Or we may also be laden with the ‘save the world’ responsibility where we could stop evil from happening. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up very tired with all the travelling into the past to repair the errors of world history - to stop despots and bad emperors from ruining the lives of their subjects.

What if we travelled into the past and befriended some cave men and they decided to follow us back to real time? Imagine the amount of adaptation they would have to undergo.  

But then again comes the trap of not being accountable for our deeds. We make mistakes and hopefully, in so doing we learn, grow and change for the better. If we could always go back and make good what went wrong, then it would be like a short cut to life. What we learn would be getting into a machine, fixing the problem and then coming back to the present in the machine. Imagine the chaos if time machines were easily available to all and sundry! Then there would certainly be great congestion in space, maybe some kind of space-jam.

 Like everything else, time travel has its repercussions. Changing the time line is a paradox. The elimination of your ancestor for example would mean you no longer exist.  We might even accidentally disrupt the normal course of various events, setting off a chain reaction that turns the future into a dystopian society – the horror of it all.

The whole element of the antithesis will be absent if we could time travel. We cannot see light without darkness. We cannot appreciate good unless we have seen the bad. We cannot hope if we are always fixing the past. Then we cheat ourselves of the joy when we see expectation realised and anticipation fulfilled. With time travel, we are in control and we sit and watch how we would like things to be. That certainly deprives us of the element called spontaneity.

Opting for the alternative – which is living in real time might not be such a  bad idea after all. By living in the here and now we learn to notice. Noticing imbues each moment with a new, fresh quality. This is called the ‘beginner’s mind.’ By acquiring the habit of noticing new things, we recognize that the world is actually changing constantly. And that is fun.

This is the last Sunday for 2013 and we will embrace the next Sunday in a new year. Where did all the time go? So, for the moment, I will just be content with Uber Morlock’s statement in H.G. Wells  The Time Machine.

“We all have our time machines, don’t we?  Those that take us back are memories…And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”

Source: The New Straits Times, http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/the-present-moment-is-always-enough-for-now-1.380330

A Partner Need Not Suffer without End

I WAS at a wedding recently and as with most weddings, the atmosphere was enough to move one's heart to bits. So I listened with interest as the newlyweds exchanged their vows.

Interestingly enough, the list of vows the bride made to her groom was twice as long as that of the groom's.

I do not know whether they wrote the vows themselves or whether they lifted them from a book.

I am not a feminist, but I thought it strange that while the groom promised to honour vows one to seven, the bride promised to honour vows one to 14.

This included honouring his dreams, his vision, his hopes and his forever while nothing was mentioned about honouring hers.

I could not help feeling that there would be a long road of sacrifice ahead for her.

She would have to give up something valued for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy, sometimes even negating her own dreams and desires.

Here, I would like to borrow Yeats' line in the poem Easter 1916: "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."

The poem was written in the context of the long, turbulent history of British colonialism in Ireland as well as alluding to the great psychological cost of the long struggle for independence.

May I be so bold as to stretch this concept to that of domestic bliss?

The question I pose is: who determines when the suffering will end and when the sacrifices are considered sufficient?

Some will smile to make it seem easier. They will put on a front because admitting it is hard. It can be seen as a weakness and many spouses feel they need to be strong for their children or be regarded as a stigma in society.

There are great husbands and wonderful husbands out there, but a cursory glance at the role of mothers and wives across cultures shows that responsibilities are certainly not shouldered equally.

I am not talking about instances where a calamity strikes the household or a spouse suffers a tragic event and is left incapable of taking care of himself.

In some societies, we see the women walking miles to the wells early in the morning to carry water in vats for their households. They then return home to cook and clean and take care of their babies while their husbands are idling away.

We are familiar with countries that "export" wives and mothers to work as domestic helpers while their own children are being cared for by some other relatives.

There is even one country that sees it as the norm for married and single men alike to have a "free Friday" where they can go to town and have non-committal sexual relationships and then return to their households for the rest of the week as if nothing has happened.

I welcome the blogging era because I find that many (women and men) can pour out their thoughts and inner feelings when before they were trapped.

I was reading a blog that went: "I'm wondering lately when enough is enough? There comes a point when you've been sacrificing for a little too long.

"I don't mean it in the general sense, because we all have to make sacrifices, but a specific situation where you give, and give, and give with nothing in return.

"I think we've passed the 'appreciation', sensitivity, compassion, beautiful point and have become desensitised, bitter, frustrated and exhausted.

"I don't think this is a permanent state of mind, or unusual, but we all have a limit."

We are human, lest we forget. There is this innate cry for some normalcy, love, companionship and a co-parent to absorb the never-ending stress of holding a home together.

To this end, I believe that every marriage should start on an equal footing, of love and respect, of bearing responsibilities together, of honouring mutual dreams and of working towards a common goal where no one is expected to shoulder more than she should.

Certainly, a good start would be to let the number of vows made on both sides be equal.

A Blessed Christmas to all Christians.

Source - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/a-partner-need-not-suffer-without-end-1.432848#ixzz2nZKgSYwD