Too Far Back

Today is my birthday and thanks to one of my favorite film series of all time, one that I have been looking forward to for a long time as it just so happens to be the same date that an intrepid young time traveller and his madcap mentor traversed the space-time continuum in order to preserve his fate and family legacy: October 21, 2015.

When I was a kid, 2015 was the future. It seemed far away at the time, so far it was hard to believe it would ever actually happen. Now it’s finally here and I can’t help but wonder what happened to all those years in between. Many things have happened in that time. Some good, some bad, some which have taught me valuable lessons, some I’m still trying to divine the meaning in and some so unexpected that if I hopped in the DeLorean, went back and told my younger self I wouldn’t believe. 

How strange is the passage of time. Simultaneously too much and not enough, we never really quite know how to regard it. We mark it with arbitrary points on our calendar collectively agreed to hold special significance when in fact every day is as finite as every other. How many times has it raced when we wish it would crawl? How often do we look for ways to kill time versus ways to make it come alive? It’s humbling to think that each of us were once, for an instant, the newest humans in the whole world and yet one day even our planet will be lost to time. Whether in memory of the past, focus on the present or abstraction of the future, life itself is time travel. Therefore it seems the real trick is to make each step of the journey count as much as the destination. 

If there’s one lesson to take from the travels of Marty and Doc, it is that the future has not been written. It is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.

And if there’s a second lesson, it’s that hoverboards save lives. Let's get on that!