Time travelling backpackers

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

It sounds catchy when describing Star Trek. In a way, we all sort of believe it - that space is the final frontier, that its exploration is what makes us adventurous.
In a certain way, that can be correct. In another… I’m not quite sure.


Lately I’ve had lots of friends traveling, and have even travelled a bit more myself, and there’s something about it that opens our minds, makes us more understanding and perhaps even wiser. There’s something about seeing cliff formations that formed thousands or millions of years ago in the bottom of the ocean that makes your life feel like a whisp of smoke. You start to question the great importance of your existence when seeing buildings and monuments that have withstood wars, weather, revolutions and changes over thousands of years. Seeing in a museum - or even in the streets of a foreign country - that the way you live life is most definitely not the only way to live life. The way you make your rice, the type of bread and the clothes you were. What you think is ugly or beautiful. None of it is a universal concept - it is mostly influenced by your culture. You are not the only one with a ‘right’ way of doing daily things. In that sense, yes travelling in space - going to other cities and countries - is an amazing frontier, exploring new worlds and civilisations.

However, I do not believe that the only way to be brave, bold and an explorer is by taking a walk, driving a car, getting a plane ticket or even travelling for years in a space ship. The truth is, I find it hard to believe that that is ‘going boldly where no man has gone before’. Most places we go - as in us, usual non-astronaut people - aren’t somewhere unique. Many people have gone there, even if you go to the most inhospitable regions of the planet.

On the other hand, I do believe we are all explorer - every single being inhabiting time. Time goes by, and the space - the places - remain. There is a certain security in that, in going to huge monuments that have survived so much. However, travelling in time, there is no security to grasp, there is no certainty. This second of this day will never come again, and in the next second you will already be a different person - not necessarily due merely to experiences that change our personalities and minds (even though those play an important role too on a more long term basis) but molecules are being substituted, tissue is being remade, we are different people in every single moment in time we inhabit.

When we explore time, although many times against our will, we are pushed on to explore literally where no man has gone before, for it has not yet come to pass. And once you pass it, you cannot go back. There is no way to know where time may lead, the changes that it will bring to our hearts, minds, souls, bodies, or even to the physical world around us.

Perhaps that is why we cling so much to space, to all that is material and tangible - for keeping our minds on that allows us to have a false sense of security. It’s like carrying with us in our journey through time whatever home we imagine our past to be. We cling to that which remains, that which we believe will not change - but time changes that too. Photographs fade, metals rust and get tarnished. Pages of letters go yellow and the words in ink dissolve, stain or disappear altogether. Time is merciless, taking away any sense of security or homeliness. Even the hugest monuments suffer with time - the acid rain corrodes, structures get worn and broken.

Mountains crumble, oceans rise and we are reminded over and over again that whilst inhabiting time, we will be trapped in the unknown. We are aimless, exiled explorers of the ever changing dynamic present we inhabit. We may try to build our home, instead of in nostalgia and the past, but in the future: only to find our wishes and desires are meaningless in light of the unpredictability of changes that come in time. We hold onto expectations which, mostly, cannot become part of the present.

What is left then? Despair? And eternal homelessness? Possibly. Homesickness for a home we have never known? Probably. But that is not bad. The same way that when in our humble travels in space we fear losing what we leave behind, we learn to love what we get too - we learn that missing is probably good, because it means having good things to remember. We learn that dwelling upon our home country or our next destination prevents us from enjoying the mountains and forests and fields before us - and this is also true in our time travelling.

Accepting homesickness is a lot easier when having a deadline to strive towards. It allows us to enjoy what we have without loss in imagining and longing. And with time, it is the same. Ultimately, as christians we can look forward to eternity, when time will not bind us anymore. We can enjoy our temporary journey away from home, learn from it that we have no control over events, learn that we are most certainly not the centre of everything, learn to live in the temporary homes our hearts are given: friends, family, church, things we have a healthy love for. We learn to keep our eyes on eternity while living in the present - but never being encouraged by God to mistakenly think our vulnerable camping tents to be our home.

Until then, if I may paraphrase:

“Time: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the human souls. Their lifelong mission: to explore strange new futures, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”