Mental Time Travel

Everything I Needed to Know for the Pandemic I Learned in Kindergarten: How to Live on the Margins

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One thing the current pandemic has killed is camaraderie, a feeling of belonging. The bars and the churches where we used to gather with others who knew our names are closed (or probably should be). We feel sidelined and lonely.

I recognize the feeling. I dealt with it in Kindergarten.

I had three major disadvantages when I went to Kindergarten:

  1. There was no one my age within four miles of my house. I had no social skills.
  2. My bus was among the last to arrive every morning. That meant that the kids on the early buses had already commandeered all the best toys. 
  3. My fifth birthday was only a month before school started. Most of the kids in the class were older than I was.  Developmentally, I was behind. In fact, my mother made me these nifty overalls because my fingers could not manage the button at the top of a pair of regular pants, to say nothing of a belt buckle. It worked, but it wasn’t a ticket to the cool kids’ table.

So, my morning went like this: 

I watched the girl who got on the tricycle first ride around and around the room. 

Wayne came on the first bus. He took over the building blocks. He was always the boss of building a castle. He told me every day that all the jobs were taken.

The other kids playing with other toys would just say, “I was here first,” and keep on playing. When the teacher would ask the other kids to share with me, they would resent me.

Most of the time, I just stood on the edge watching. The other kids treated me like I didn’t exist. When I hear the word “marginalize,” I remember that experience.

In some ways, I’m back on the margins again. I’m watching from the sidelines as younger, healthier people minister to others, reopen their businesses, work from home, or go back to their places of employment. Age and underlying health issues keep me cooped up at home.

In more important ways, I am now the one who was there first. I am a white male Boomer. I get a check from Social Security every month. I get another from my pension board.

My neighbors are mostly people of color. A majority are either immigrants or first generation Americans. They were living on the margins before the pandemic. But they were making it. They were hustling in ways that I never saw white male boomers hustle in my whole life. Now, our emergency food distribution lines can be 600 people long. 

I remember how it felt on the margin, watching the kids who got there first, hoping they would share with me, or at least get tired and move on, leaving something behind for me to play with.

So, Jacquie and I have upped our giving, especially to organizations that are trying to serve people who aren’t eligible for other kinds of help, like undocumented immigrants. Yes, “illegals.” I know. We are terrible people, but they are our neighbors and Jesus told us to love them. I am trying to treat them the way I wish the other kids had treated me when I was standing at the margins.

The cool thing about giving is that I feel connected to others. I don’t feel like I am just watching from the margins.

Time Travel Safety Tips: 1 The Past

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I recently discovered that Time Travel is a thing. I mean a thing that scientists study; Mental Time Travel, that is.

It’s kind of a big deal. Scientists study our ability:

To go back in time and learn from experience.

The ability to go ahead in time and plan for the future. 

These scientists look to St. Augustine (354-480 CE) as their precursor. He said:

The past is present as memory.

The future is present as expectation.

What is happening now is also present.

In this post, I want to write about how to go back to the past. Soon, I will post about how to go to the future. And then, how to stay in the present.*

How to Go Back to the Past

Yes, traveling back in time means remembering.

But, it’s different from the way you remember your mother’s maiden name or the value of pi. Those memories seem to be stuffed inside some neurons in your brain.

If you close your eyes and remember:

  • What it was like to sit down at the family table
  • What your mother’s pie looked like, what it smelled like, and how it tasted
  • Then add guests from her side of the family

The visual, hearing, olfactory, and emotional parts of your brain light up the way they would if you were there eating that pie at that table with those people.

In a very real sense, you are traveling back in time.

I have been doing a lot of time traveling lately.

It’s what people do in the Third Half of Life.

I found there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. I’ve been doing it wrong. I am learning to do it right. 

You may have tips of your own. I’d like to hear them.

The wrong way to do it.

If you have read stories or seen movies about people traveling back to the past, you know the danger of getting stuck there. That can happen to us.

The two great dangers of Time Traveling in the past are nostalgia and resentment or regret.

Nostalgia holds us in an idealized past. Nothing in the present or the future will ever measure up to our glowing memories of things like: 

  • A happy childhood.
  • The year you were captain of the high school basketball team.
  • Back when anything was possible, and you dreamed about backpacking in Europe, or starting your own business, or becoming an artist. 

 

Resentment holds us in the grip of past times when people wronged us:

  • When mother forgot your birthday.
  • When the coach took you out right before you could have won the championship.
  • When someone else’s decision narrowed your choices.


Regret holds us in the grip of times past when we did wrong:

  • That first lie you told your parents.
  • Missing the basket that could have won the championship.
  • Not spending enough time with loved ones who are now gone.

We all know that the cure for resentment is to forgive others The cure for regret is to forgive yourself. But how? 

I am not much given to nostalgia. But the way I am learning to travel in the past strikes me as a good way to overcome nostalgia and it helps with forgiveness, too.

The Right Way to Travel in the Past

I got these ideas from the wonderful book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as Spiritual Practice, by Pat Schneider.

Close your eyes and see a door. It is a door you know. Some examples:

  • The door to the first house you remember.
     • The door to your elementary school.
     • The door to a friend’s house.
     • The door to a house of worship.
     • The door to a bedroom.

Close your eyes and see the first door that comes up for you.

Now, open that door, and step inside. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? Whom do you meet? 

You can also close your eyes and look into a deep well, and see a face reflected in the water. Whose face do you see? What do you remember about that person?

Practice this kind of remembering. You could write down what is on the other side of the door, or what you remember about the face in the well. Do it deliberately for a while and, soon, the past will arise unbidden.

When I do this kind of time traveling, there are certain images and times that keep coming up. They are almost always on the farm where I grew up. They are not idealized. They always have manure or mud in them. I remember my mother scolding me. I also remember her pie.

I open the back door to our farmhouse and see my mother in the kitchen stirring something on the stove with one hand while trying to read a book with the other. That’s definitely her.

I look into a deep well and see my maternal grandfather’s face staring back at me. It looks a lot like the face I see in the mirror.

I open the door to the bedroom I shared with my brother and remember hearing the distant train whistle blowing in the middle of the night.

Each of these are like  threads that, if I pull on them, will release moments, days, and years with all their drama and feelings. The memories seem to unfold like a movie of my own life.

The more I go back to these places and people, the more I see them without anger or shame or longing. I just look. I see myself and others as if I were in an audience watching a play on stage. I might be caught up in the story, but I never confuse my observing self with what is taking place on my mental stage. I can watch without nostalgia, resentment, or regret. I can just let these moments be. I can learn from them. I can also let them go. 

One of the most famous books of the 20th Century was, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. He says that his several-volume work all flooded back to him when he broke open a warm pastry one morning. The aroma reminded him of visiting an aunt when he was a small boy. She always served the same pastry.

I am not as good as Proust at traveling in the past, but I am slowly learning. By using these two practices, I travel back through the years. I learn from the past without getting stuck in nostalgia, resentment, and regret.

How do you safely travel backward in time? What do you remember?

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