The Time Travel Chronicles (28 page)

Letting go is about being vulnerable to yourself and others. Trust that most of the time it’s going to be ok, and when it’s not, trust that you are still valuable and have something worthwhile to contribute.

I love you, 37. Learn to love yourself.

73

I sat at the desk trying to soak in every word in front of me. I didn’t know how much time I had. Minutes? Seconds? I was trying to memorize each word when I heard someone stir in the corridor outside the door. I wondered who it could be and looked up, desperately hoping. I held my breath as the soft fall of footsteps padded down the hall, and then I was back in the Dolby, breathing hard and trying to control my emotions at this very public event.

I
won several gold statuettes that night. They sit on a shelf in my living room.

When I told Eva about my latest hallucination, she had an interesting response. “You know, Noah, you give yourself really great advice.”

I chuckled. “How’s that?”

“What’s interesting is that you and I don’t have to agree about time travel to agree on this point.
Maybe
your future self just sent you an important message.
Maybe
your future self saved you from a pretty bad life when you were thirteen. I’d rather think that some part of your thirteen-year-old self was trying to protect you, but I don’t think it matters either way. What matters is that you’re changing your path.”

“How am I changing things if things always happen just as I’ve seen them happen?”

“I think that’s where my point of view lets me see more clearly. From a non-time-travel perspective, you’ve done a fine job of understanding your weaknesses and growing from them. You’re still married. You’ve won multiple Oscars, for Pete’s sake. It’s only your belief that you’re somehow tied to the railroad tracks in life that has kept you down. If you could give up your worry about the future and truly live the moment in front of you, I think you might be quite content. Think of it this way; each one of these hallucinations has served you in some way. You’ve been helping yourself all along. I have to believe there will come a time when you look back and see that courtroom as a gift. I think that’s what you were trying to say to yourself with the letter.”

I left that meeting with Eva more hopeful than I had been in a long time. If I was working from the future for my own good—even if I was hallucinating the future for my own good—then perhaps there was some way forward that didn’t involve disaster.

With hope, I finally began making progress with Rachel. I started trusting again, and slowly our marriage stopped feeling so hollow.

I got out of the way and let her career take center stage.

Well, in truth, my career hit a bit of a slump. I was never told that I had been blacklisted, but for some reason, it suddenly became hard to find money to make films. I guess winning eight of the ten Oscars
Gossamer
was nominated for—including best screenplay, best director, and best picture—wasn’t enough for Hollywood. Publicly, I was called a maverick; privately, my scripts were considered D.O.A.

I took some time off, waiting for things to cool down. I wrote a novel. It was terrible. I kept telling myself that I still had something to contribute.

Careerwise, it was a long four years. Marriagewise, we thrived.

At forty-one, I was offered a chance to do a television series for HBO. It was good business to have my name behind the project. I jumped at the chance—anything to get back in the chair. It was an LA noir thing about a former drug dealer who turns P.I. when he’s released from prison.

A few weeks later, I found myself walking around a studio backlot with an assistant producer who was showing me the sets they had in mind for the first few episodes. He showed me the office space they had set up for the lead’s parole officer and a few other things. Then he opened a set of double doors, walked me into a full-sized courtroom, and said, “Welcome to California Superior Court. Of course, this courtroom is about three times as big as the real ones, but it gives the cameras places to move.”

I covered my mouth and collapsed into the back bench, eyes filling with tears. I looked at the producer and said through a husky voice, “Sorry. Can I have a moment?”

Startled, and a little concerned, he said, “Yeah, sure,” and stepped back out the doors.

I knew then exactly how I was going to set it up. I dialed my wife’s agent.

Three weeks later, we did a casting call for a whole bunch of bit parts. My wife auditioned for the part of the lead’s estranged wife who divorces him in a flashback during the first episode. I sat in for the lead, who had already been chosen. Without any cameras and the crew sitting in as the audience, we ran actors through their paces. I had written the script the night before.

I had the hardest time holding it together when Rachel arrived on set. I kept my distance until we were sitting there with the gap between us. I said action and almost immediately disappeared into the back of my head as my nineteen-year-old self came to see what might have been if he hadn’t changed.

Oh, how desperately I wanted to watch Rachel. I wanted to see if she understood, but I was helpless, and then our eyes met. She kept her character, but after thirteen years of marriage, I saw what my teenage self could not. I saw the surprise and recognition.

As soon as I was allowed access again, I cut the scene. This time I was prepared for the onslaught of emotions. I called for a lunch break and quickly sat back down, staring blankly at the judge’s bench in front of me. While the others walked away, Rachel got up slowly and came over. She sat down on the table facing me. Towering above me as I slumped in the chair, she focused her ice blue eyes on mine. “I believe you.”

The sweet relief that I had been holding back started to wash ashore. “Really? I thought you would say that I just set this up to fool myself.”

“I did think that, and I was really pissed.” She chuckled. “The anger was really great for my performance, and then I saw your eyes. They weren’t the eyes of someone who knew what was coming. There was genuine shock and fear in them, and I knew.”

My shoulders began to shake.

Rachel got off the table and wrapped me in her arms.

“I did it to change myself, Rachel. I did it all because I wanted a good life, a life with you.”

* * *

There’s really not much to tell after that. Forty-three was really interesting. I ended up arriving at the breakfast table with Rachel when I was sixty-seven. We had a nice five minute chat before I came back. Our only child was born soon after. Rachel had never told me she wanted to have a child until that moment.

Eighty-one was the hard one. Rachel had been gone three years at that point. I jumped back to forty-seven, and there she was.

Overall, the jumps were much less dramatic after forty-one. It’s almost as if the universe knew that I already had what I truly needed.

There isn’t an open loop for eighty-nine unless I jump forward to ninety-seven, which I hope to God I do not. So I expect I’m near the end.

I don’t know what to say, except I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t dropped that tray. What would have changed? Would things have been worse? Or would they have been better?

Two days ago, I had my chance. One moment I’m bending over to tie a shoe I can barely reach, and the next I’m looking down a thirteen-year-old girl’s shirt. I hesitated. I could change everything, and then I realized that it had been a good life.

After I dropped the tray, I cried without shame. I cried for the thirteen-year-old who would suffer so much. I cried for the woman I loved and had left behind. I cried for Alexis and her insecurities and for the innocence we were in such a rush to leave behind.

And I cried because despite all of life’s indignities, regrets, and pain, I would have gladly traded places with my thirteen-year-old self and done it all again.

A Word from Erik Wecks

You may not know it yet, but we are in the midst of a scientific revolution in the understanding and treatment of mental illness.

New therapies such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy are part of a new wave of rigorous scientific methods for handling what were once thought to be intractable mental illnesses. These new Cognitive Behavioral Therapies are making a difference in the lives of those who struggle with everything from Depression to Borderline Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Not only are practices such as mindfulness, meditation, and self-compassion showing demonstrable, scientifically-valid improvements in such illnesses, but the suspected reasons behind these improvements now fit into a strong vibrant narrative of the human mind.

Scientists now understand that human behavior is governed by two competing systems, a limbic system that is closely tied to your core evolutionary missions of survival and procreation, and a prefrontal cortex that functions as an advanced pattern recognition system. It is the prefrontal cortex that has provided our obscene evolutionary success.

Scientists are just beginning to understand the interplay between these two systems. For instance, have you ever had the experience of being deathly afraid of something—say jumping into water—based on an event that happened in childhood? That happens because the limbic system has no sense of time or teleology. It doesn’t understand that what was dangerous for you as a child is no longer dangerous for you as an adult.

This is why so many of our emotional experiences in life are front loaded to our childhood where our limbic system learned the patterns it will use to govern our existence until we die. Scientists now believe that our core belief that life is either generally safe or generally dangerous develops before we are two years old. Think about that! By the time we’re two we have made decisions about the nature of existence that, without intervention, will govern many of our behaviors until we die!

This leads me to wish that I could travel in time.  Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could go back to important moments in our life and nudge ourselves in the right direction? What if we could see the consequences for our choices years down the road? How would that change our behaviors in the past?

We may not be able to travel in time, but through new therapies we are beginning to be able to slowly reprogram our limbic system. In a real sense we are now able to go back in time and learn the right lessons from the past in order to live wholeheartedly in this present moment.

To my eyes, that is a revolution. We are living in an era in which our growing understanding of the mind will have significant impacts on our well-being for centuries to come. It may well be that in the same way the industrial age brought a new era in human physical heath, the information age will create a new era in human mental health.
 

http://www.amazon.com/Erik-Wecks/e/B007J8G5OQ/

by Ann Christy

Chapter One – Wakey, Wakey

“H
ELLO, THERE. How are you feeling?”

Darren Gordan tried to focus on the blurry smudge above him. He could tell it was a face and the voice—a woman’s voice somehow both light and husky—seemed to be coming from that general direction. A fuzzy outline of dark hair surrounded a paler surface, two dark spots for eyes. The image wavered a bit as the face turned away. A moment later, an equally blurry shape he thought might be a hand tapped away at something that emitted sharp, computer-like tones with each movement.

The woman made a little “ah” of discovery and then leaned down, coming into slightly better focus as she neared. He urged his body to move—a hand, his head, any part of him would do—but he felt as heavy as a boulder. There was a dead and weighty feeling in his limbs. Only his eyes seemed to be obeying him at the moment and then, only so much.

Her hair came into focus before the rest of her, flowing down around her face. Beautiful dark hair with regular waves, almost too perfect to be natural. The ends, coiled into little-girl curls, touched his shoulder and he could feel the slight weight of them against his skin. The sensation relieved him, spared him from wondering further if he’d been paralyzed and left without feeling forever. Mere inches from his face, the pale smudge resolved into the woman’s face.

“There you are,” she said, her lips moving into a gentle smile and her eyes searching his face. “Everything is fine. You’re just waking up and that takes some time.”

She brushed long, slender fingers across his cheek. Her touch was soft and gentle and felt like a thousand feathers moving across his skin. She must have seen the strain in his face as he tried to speak, because a line creased her brow and she said, “Just relax. I’ll stay here with you while things sync up.” The smile returned and grew, “You’ve been gone a long time. You can’t expect to just jump up and play cordball first thing.”