Treasure Map

Time travel, the obsession humans have with going back in time, or lunging to the future. Change what is now done, see what tomorrow holds. A strong will to exert some form of control over what so often seems incontrollable.

Chaos is a strong force in our universe, arguably the strongest. We are not and might never be ready to fully admit how much randomness rules our feeble lives. How come Earth, of all places, has life? Why did you meet that one person, that particular day? What are the odds of everything, really?

We understand that controlling this chaos is... tricky. Virtually impossible, but we as humankind are not OK with accepting it. So throughout history we searched and searched for answers. Ways to control time and chaos. Gods, odds, luck, destiny. The explanation that clicks better to each one of us.

Astrology, the way I see it, is an attempt to take control, to understand why things work the way they work and have a glimpse of what is to come. Control an anxiety over the hopelessness of not being able, not really, to determine our lives. But see, we already have a gift of time travel embedded in our grey matter: memory. We can go back in time, revisit what we lived, revisit what others lived through History, that capital H catalogue of stories lived and remembered.

Yet this is not enough. It does not feed the beast that desires agency, the capability of doing things different. Second chances. Memories are not second chances, they are reminders of everything we already went through, joyful or terrifying as they are in a point of space and time that our corporeal forms no longer have access too.

I speak and think a lot about memory, about stories carrying the heritage of who we are and what we lived, but lately I've been thinking about the unknown. How good an exercise, not as a storyteller but as human, to try and visualize the future. Our grey matter is also equipped to travel forward in time: the future is a story we create. One we have not accessed yet, but we can use as a target, a map to where we want to go with X marking the spot, but the path still foggy and unknown. And we need that; we need this freedom to imagine things out of their current state so we can reorganize chaos, effectively find patterns in randomness and trace the path to the X marked on the map.

We are living, breathing time travel machines. Isn't that cool?

-Maíra