Contemporary Time Travel

Although time flows forward like a river, social change doesn't flow evenly—it rushes forward in some places while barely moving in others, like a waterway with both rapids and quiet pools.

When I was in high school, a group of my friends and I played ultimate frisbee in a field near my house. It started raining almost as soon as we began playing, and after 10 minutes we were covered in mud. One moment is ingrained in my mind forever: my friend Will, our school's top runner, sprinting through the wet grass and leaping to catch the frisbee, snatching it midair before crashing into an enormous pool of Virginia red clay, sliding through the dirt like a skimboard.

As soon as my mom saw us, she made us wait outside so she could take a photo. I thought it wasn't a big deal—we could always take another photo. I can remember waiting, kind of annoyed, while she found a camera. But she was right. That was one of the last times we ever played frisbee together, and we certainly never played like that in the mud again. What makes this photo even more bittersweet is that Will and I rarely talk anymore.

I had never been an adult, and so while I intellectually understood that moments like this would one day be inaccessible to me, I didn’t feel just how precious they were.

Looking at it now, I understand my mother knew something about life I wouldn't understand for years to come: some moments are irreplaceable windows in time, and when they close, they close forever. I can never be sixteen again. I can never again get my group of high school friends to play frisbee in the mud. The laughter that echoed across that rain-soaked field exists now only in memory—and in that single photograph my mother insisted on taking.

Yet while some moments slip away forever, others are reborn and persist, flowing through generations like melodies whispered across time. Every Christmas Eve, my family joins hands and dances around the tree, singing Danish carols passed down from my grandmother. None of us speak Danish—the words are remembered sounds more than understood language—but they carry meaning deeper than mere understanding. As we circle the tree singing "Nu ar det jul igen," we're not just celebrating Christmas. We're reaching through time to connect with my grandmother, with her family heritage in Denmark, and with countless other families who've danced these same steps and sung these same words on winter nights throughout the centuries.

Grandma, the young woman on the left. Christmas, probably late 1940s.

When I close my eyes and sing those words I can't even understand, I can feel the thread of tradition stretching backward and forward through time: my grandmother as a little girl, learning these songs from her own grandmother; my own childhood wonder at the ritual; and perhaps someday, children yet unborn singing the same words. While I can't celebrate Christmas with grandma anymore, through this tradition, she, and her entire extended family, is still with me. Not understanding the words somehow makes it more special to me—the song is not about a particular idea or aspect of Christmas—it somehow represents everything that can be felt about the holidays, but not expressed in words.

After one such Christmas, I began to wonder: if moments from the past extend into the present, can we actively seek them out? And if we can, what would that mean for how we live our lives?

Books have long served as humanity's original time machines, letting us learn the thoughts and hopes and fears and dreams that occupied minds centuries ago. But there's something different about physically experiencing echoes of other times—touching them, experiencing them—living them. Because although time flows forward like a river, social change doesn't flow evenly—it rushes forward in some places while barely moving in others, like a waterway with both rapids and quiet pools.

The light we are given

In Shanghai, a man used to collect old chairs on a cart. After meeting the veteran, I couldn’t help but think of the symbolism of this act.

Sometimes these temporal crossings happen by chance. A couple years ago at an airport in Virginia, flying home for Christmas, I saw a man wearing a "World War Two: I Served" hat. I asked him where he served, and he told me about the Pacific Theatre, where he was a pilot, and how he lived in Shanghai after World War Two, training the Chinese air force in 1946. I told him that I had also lived in Shanghai, 66 years after he did, near Jing An, and he told me how he could still remember flying over the same streets where I had once walked. This was the old French Concession, an area with European-style mansions from the early 1900s. It was somehow beautiful but sad to think how we had both lived in the same city, so many decades apart, before fate brought us together for a few minutes in my hometown, just before Christmas. And although we were both 8,000 miles and years past our respective time living in China, our conversation brought me back, to both 2012 and 1946.

This is not a picture of my apartment building, but rather a picture of how it felt.

When I studied at the University of Hong Kong, I experienced another moment that felt like time travel. My neighbor was an elderly woman who must've been born in the 1920s or 1930s. We passed each other silently for months on our narrow stairway, exchanging only smiles, until one day we finally spoke. I was shocked to find that she spoke perfect English with an aristocratic British accent—a living reminder of Hong Kong's colonial era, hidden behind a gentle smile in a fading, six-story walk-up apartment building, dwarfed by the surrounding neon-tinged skyscrapers. We always said we would get tea, but my visa was not renewed, and so I am left with the regret of never truly getting to know her.

The light we seek

But we don't have to wait for chance encounters to engage in contemporary time travel. We can seek them out intentionally, finding places where time seems to move at different speeds. In 2013, I visited North Korea, and the Chinese tourists who traveled with me wouldn't stop comparing the country to their homeland in the 1960s. "This is exactly like the stories my parents told me about China in the 1960s and '70s," they'd say. We were witnessing a shadow of their past casting light into our present—a remarkable window into another time. And indeed, the hand painted propaganda posters—done with remarkable precision—looked like something out of a 20^th century history book.

But these moments didn’t just connect me to the harsh legacy of Communism, it also reminded me of the inherent dignity and humanity of people, no matter where they happen to be born. Seeing the quiet laughter and small talk amongst North Koreans we met demonstrated how people born in systems vastly different from our own still maintain their fundamental humanity. While I only saw a curated, tiny sliver of life there, it still gave me a faint understanding of life for many under undemocratic regimes, and a small window into Russia, China, and so many other places in the 20^th century. By contrast, seeing the vibrancy of South Korea demonstrates how political decisions made decades ago have dramatic effects today.

These windows in time don't just open to the past, sometimes they reveal the glimmers of a coming dawn. When I lived in Shanghai in 2012, I had to pay for everything in cash—even my apartment rent required a thick stack of bills, since the largest bill was worth only about $12 and my roommate and I, as foreigners, had to pay two months of rent at a time, far in advance. When I returned just three years later, the situation had completely reversed. Everyone was paying with smartphones and QR codes; cash had become almost obsolete. In those few short years, China had leapt into a digitized future that much of the world is still approaching. I have heard that this trend has rapidly continued.

Such pockets of accelerated or decelerated time exist everywhere, if we know where to look. Countries like Cuba, or even towns like Green Bank, West Virginia (where cellphones are banned due to a nearby radio telescope) offer windows to a past time. Walking through an old European village, dining in a fifth-generation family restaurant, you might find yourself thinking: if you squint, you could be in 1800. Walking between skyscrapers in airconditioned underground passages in Singapore, or seeing driverless taxis in Los Angeles, it’s hard not to see glimpses of a warming, increasingly automated world.

The light that remains

But we don't need to travel far to experience different eras. Sometimes they're right in front of us: the family-run diner that hasn't changed in decades, the elderly neighbor who was a nurse in World War Two, or even developing a true appreciation for music from a different era. Small, everyday versions of contemporary time travel exist in the most unexpected places—in a favorite song we haven't heard in years, or in a grandmother's recipe that transports us back to childhood.

Contemporary Time Travel (CTT) is simply the acknowledgment that change is inevitable, but not all change happens at the same speed. When we think carefully about this, and act accordingly, we can have a richer life.

In a practical sense this realization allows us to experience things that were once common but are now rare, or things that will soon be common, but aren’t yet. Taken lightly, it’s a fun and meaningful way to find new restaurants, hobbies, or places to visit.

But in a deeper, more philosophical sense, viewing the world this way allows us to lead more romantic and meaningful lives. By making ourselves acutely aware of the way changes ebb and flow, we can appreciate and treasure the present moment, and truly make the most of it. By finding doorways to other eras, we learn how people in every era share our fundamental humanity.

We may even realize that, despite the very real problems we face, we are already living in a time that people in the future—including, perhaps, ourselves—might just view with immense, unbounded, nostalgia.

The light we create

How you practice contemporary time travel depends on what you value. A sports fan might take the opportunity to meet the last living greats of a fading generation of athletes. Others might visit our rapidly disappearing glaciers, or engage with the greatest generation before they pass on. Visiting your childhood home, or sending a letter to an long-forgotten classmate can connect you to the person you once were.

But you don’t have to chase after big, grand gestures. Recording an interview with a relative, or making a silly movie with your high school friends can bring immense satisfaction later in life. And maybe, just maybe, now is the time to start a new hobby, learn a new language, or move to a new town. After all, if the future is coming anyway, you might as well make it one you want to live in.  

When Grandma died, we went to Canon Beach, where she used to take my mom and uncle in the summers after Grandpa died young.

I think everyone naturally understands aspect of this phenomenon, but many don’t think about it seriously to take the lessons to heart. I include myself, even still, in that category. Deeply understanding this concept can change how we live. A friend of mine, a professional pianist, shared a story recently. A woman in her early sixties came up to him after a performance and said, "In another life, I would be a piano player too." He replied simply: "What's wrong with this one?"

When he saw her next, she told him how that comment spurred her to go to a piano shop, buy a piano, and begin chasing a dream she had been pushing away. When her husband asked how her day was, she said "I went and bought a piano." At first he thought she was joking. But it was true, and she still plays every day, a decade later, and has since become quite good. Without his comment, perhaps that dream would've remained just that.

Perhaps the most bittersweet realization is what we already know, but rarely acknowledge: today's present is someone else's past—including our own future self's past. When we truly think deeply about this, we realize that there may come a time when we are nostalgic for what we have right now, no matter how difficult things may appear. This is not always true—some situations are too horrible for that—but it often is. That can spur us to create new memories, take extra photos, and focus on the small things that are beautiful and irreplaceable about our life today.

Autumn is my favorite season, wherever I may be.

And if you are in a tough time now, give yourself some grace. You might write your future self a letter, telling them how hard you are working now for a better life for them.

Contemporary Time Travel is like witnessing the brilliant light of a distant, long dead star, visible precisely because of, not despite, its distance from us. We can find this light in songs and traditions passed down through generations, in chance meetings at airports, in old buildings made small by skyscrapers. Like so many faraway constellations, we too are creating light that will travel forward through time, touching moments we'll never see. And because we live in someone else's distant past, we have the responsibility to create a world worth being nostalgic for. Living a life worth remembering isn't just for us – it’s a way of adding our own light to the universe of human experience that future generations will see shining back through time.

If we understand this, maybe we'll see our own moment in time with the same wonder and appreciation we feel for times long past or yet to come. And if we do, maybe we won't need a time machine to find a perfect moment— we'll be living in one.

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btw… here’s a playlist that kinda sounds how contemporary time travel feels… to me at least.