Fast Forward
If you’d asked me in middle school, I would have given anything to fast forward through that particular chapter in life. I remember sitting in class thinking that if a genie granted me one wish, I’d ask for a remote control to life that gave me the magical ability to skip over anything this boring and awkward. I was the new kid at a country school. Making friends wasn’t going nearly as well as I’d hoped. Although there was this one student that I had an awfully big crush on. Couldn’t I just fast forward to see if he ever turned out to like me too?
It turns out that this isn’t a very unique wish. Whether you go back to the original tale of “The Magic Thread” or the film “About Time”, the idea that we could time travel is something humans have dreamed, written, and talked about for eons. In the tale, a boy is given a ball of thread by an old woman and told that this is his life thread. If he wants to make time pass a little quicker, all he has to do is tug gently on the thread. But once the thread has been tugged out, it cannot be put back in. And if he tells anyone about it, he will immediately die. At first, he tugs on the thread a little every day, only whenever he is bored. Then he begins to tug on it to pass larger spans of time. The year until his marriage. The two years he’s to be away for the war. And that’s when he notices how quickly his mother seems to be aging. He’s stunned to realize that every time he’s tugged the thread to pass his own time, he’s also passed his mother’s time and brought her closer to her death!
I won’t spoil the end of it for you other than to say this: we need the dull, bad, boring times in our lives just as much as the exciting, glorious, wonderful ones. The wonderful times lose much of their flavor and vibrancy without anything to set them against. Endless “perfect” days stretched out side by side, week after week, month after month, would soon come to be far less enjoyable and perfect.
If we look at the past, we can also see that there were unexpected times that shaped us - experiences that made us who we are today even though they were NOT pleasant to go through when we were in them. I can think of at least two times from my own life when I would have been heavily tempted to tug on that thread. The thing is, if I had skipped ahead, if I’d cut my suffering and my grief short, I wouldn’t have the depth that I do today or the experience that gives me the unique ability to empathize with others who are going through something similar. That’s a beautiful gift, but the cost of it is staying. The cost is sitting with your own hard times as you let them shape you. I’m not talking about staying in something dysfunctional, I’m talking about the things life can throw at us that we’d never predict or ask for. Looking at them only through the lens of the past allows us to see their true value, no thread tugging needed.
Challenges/Points:
It’s common to fantasize about skipping ahead in time, especially when we’re bored or in pain.
Skipping ahead in time may seem like a dream come true, but it would come with a heavy cost.
It’s only when we look at the past from the present that we can see how valuable hard times might have been and how they have shaped us.
Questions:
Have you ever daydreamed about skipping ahead in part of your life?
What would you skip if someone gave you the thread of your life? Anything? Nothing?
Is there something life is trying to teach you right now in a painful chapter that you don’t really want to learn?
To talk more about this or something else on your mind text the number 494949 to chat with our team or visit RemedyLIVE.com/chat anytime, day or night.
Did someone send you this post, and you want to subscribe to our free self care guide? Text CARE to 494949 to receive daily posts.
