Thoughts on Time

Time is a funny thing and physicists don't quite understand it. We can go up and down, left and right, back and forward and everything in between but try walking out of time and you might as well try flying by flapping your arms. Everyone knows that time only flows one way. Time goes forward and we are carried along with it. We can't step out of it and go backwards or sideways just ever forwards into the unknown. We are anchored in time but is time similarly anchored to us?

How many times have you gone to phone someone only to have them call you? People talk of coincidence and premonitions but what if it is more? As an adolescent I struggled with depression. There was no rhyme or reason and nothing to trigger it. I maintain to this day that I had no idea what was coming to me. I never imagined Jonathan would be taken from us far too soon and that one day my life would be blown to pieces in such a silent way. In the aftermath I struggled and I suffered as I have never suffered before but I had some emotional tools at hand because I had suffered before, all be it a shadow of what I suffered then. Now I look back and think..... Can something that has that big an impact defy what we know of time? Can the echoes go backwards as well as forwards? Four years on and life has reached something of an equilibrium point. I have a new normal and I am happy with it even if it does provide its own stresses and challenges. Yet sometimes I have to relive that day. Occasionally my brain insists on replaying the moments my life splintered in a horrifyingly real nightmare. The police, the stairs, the relatives room and finally Jonathan. Jonathan lying still and alone. Jonathan as I had never seen him yet still I asked "Is there any chance?" Knowing there wasn't hoping with all I had there was. It plays in my head in seconds yet it took hours. The day my life shattered. It is a moment in time that has forever changed me. It will affect me and my decisions for the rest of my life, is it really so hard to believe that it might have affected me before it even happened? Is cursed ground really cursed or do the echoes of future tragedy make it feel so? Are premonitions not us looking forward but is feeling the echo bouncing back just as it will bounce forward in the way we all know and accept as normal? The equations allow one to go backwards so maybe it does but we are just unable to comprehend it. Maybe time, like so many other physical phenomenon is simply more complex than we can imagine.