The Weight of Time and the Will to Wander

I am wildly fascinated with the concept of time travel. Avoiding the paradoxes my journey through time and space may cause, I often wonder what it would be like to be a voyeur in an earlier time. Would I resist the urge to alter a timeline if I knew of tragic endings? Could I view events as they happened and use it as an opportunity to gain a new perspective on the past? Those are hard questions for me to answer.

I find myself thinking of time quite a bit these days. At forty-one years old, I am firmly in middle age—and if genetics has a say, I may be closer to three-quarters age. Regardless, I’m at an age where there are probably more years behind me than ahead. Time flies by in the blink of an eye. While at the dentist last week, I asked the hygienist how long she’d been doing that job, and she mentioned that this was her twentieth year cleaning teeth. We both commented on how fast two decades have slipped by, and how much the world has changed.

Weather and health issues are more often topics of conversation now than the things that concerned me in my youth. Yet, here I am, with gray hair and arthritis, gearing up to do screamy vocals for the same band I poured my soul into during college. It’s exciting to think that—God willing—I’ll get on stage again and play the music I love. I’ve lived long enough for the fashion and particular brand of heavy music I was involved with to both come full circle and be relevant again. The kids are calling bands like mine “Dad Core.” Even though I’ve never had kids, I am old enough to be the father of most people currently going to hardcore shows. What a time to be alive.

Looking forward to some perceived better days or opportunities used to occupy my mind regularly. Now, I find myself content that I’m still here. I’m happy to still have hope for various dreams to come to fruition, but less concerned about whether they actually do. I’ve learned over the years that the pursuit of these things is far more rewarding than achieving the goals I set out to. Usually, once I reach a mountaintop, I get bored and start looking for new peaks. So, I’ve learned to enjoy the valleys.

If I had a time machine, I don’t think I’d try to change anything in my life. Sure, there are tragedies and traumas I wish hadn’t occurred, but those things made me who I am. Perhaps the very fact that I’m a writer and creative in general is a response to some negative impact I grew through—I’d hate to lose that by smoothing out some rough edge in my past. No, if I had a time machine, I think I’d bypass my timeline altogether and go see if I could ride a woolly mammoth—or perhaps go a bit further back and high-five a T. rex.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina. His work has been published in Reptiles Magazine, Dirtbag Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, Backcountry Journal, Wildlife in North Carolina, SOFLETE, The Tarheel Guardsman, Wildsound Writing Festival, and others. His poetry collection “A Toad in a Glass Jar” is scheduled for publication in late fall 2024 by Dead Reckoning Collective. He has written three Children’s books and one Christian Devotional book. He filmed and directed a documentary about his deployment in Iraq with the Army called “Hammer Down.” He spends most of his free time wrangling toads.

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