I’m sure if it has an answer, the resolution to the grandfather paradox would turn out to be quite unsurprising, even boring. 

Firstly, the paradox that ponders the fate of a time traveler who would kill their grandfather before their own birth likely doesn’t even represent a version of time travel that could ever be possible. 

Secondly, the curiosity behind the paradox itself seems to ignore something fundamental to the experience of time that none of us can escape: every moment is the present; you can never be in the past. “Being,” by necessity, only happens in the present. 

Rather than questioning whether potential grand-patricidal time travelers would wink out of existence, maybe the more apt question here would be: “how would you live as a person who had made that kind of a choice?” Sure, maybe they would erase themselves out of existence, or maybe they’d simply cease to exist as a morally-functioning person (arguably much worse than the first quantum physical possibility). 

“How will I live as a person who has made this kind of a choice?”—that’s the real time travel conundrum each person faces daily. Each of us always lives in a present, formed by a past, heading toward a future.

Mental Time “Travel”

Our time machines are not police boxes, DeLoreans, or enchanted stones. Our brains themselves come fully equipped to deliver us from the Now at the simple suggestion of a neurotransmitter passed between synapses. The right flow of serotonin or dopamine, supplied by an experience or substance of one’s choice, is all that’s needed to escape the oppression of the present moment.

Time for us humans is a reality only known and experienced by the mind; its only real “travel” is a matter of thought. 

Maybe some escape the guilt of an unbearable past by suspending their mind’s genuine contact with the present, using a steady stream of pleasing distractions to keep at bay the inevitable reckoning of what they’re becoming. 

Similarly, the impending, unknowable possibilities yet to come may drive one to cope with the future by fixating on a past that one is free to remember, idealize and revel in without threat of the unpredictability of change. 

Whether it be presence-stealing distractions or present-numbing nostalgia, mental time travel is an enterprise designed to circumvent the Now. I engage in a deceptively subtle form of it when I reach for another handful of a snack when writing the next sentence of a Rumination comes haltingly to me. Rather than engage with the present in all its discomfort, I seek release—elsewhere-ness in my mind—when this moment asks more of me than I want to yield.

At best it may be uncomfortable—at it’s worst, unbearable—but to abide in the only slice of time that God gives me is my duty as a mental-time traveler. Our persistent awareness of the present is our only contact with “living” time, our only interaction with the stuff of reality in a way that is tangible and responsive. 

I cannot know the future; I cannot change the past. Because those are facts of the universe, the present moment must be the only one for which I am responsible, and, therefore, the only one in which I ought to concern myself.

But our inherent mental-time travel abilities—forward and backward—are not somehow flawed or forbidden. Our faculties of traveling to the past through memory and of glimpsing a future through anticipation truly are gifts, and they’ll be fulfilled as such when used in service of the present. When memories deepen investment in the here and now, not distract from it; when imagination of the future inspires hope for the moment, not preoccupation, then we’re being responsible time travelers. If recollection and prediction are used as a means of escape from the present—of supposing a way of being that is not in accord with what actually is—then the gift is being misused. 

I’m not using my mind’s ability to traverse time well if my actions or my thinking are excusing me from answering the continually uncomfortable question of every moment: “How will I live as a person who has made such choices?”

Now: The Supreme Moment

Everything brings us back to the present. We may try to evade it’s claim on us, retreating to a thousand other times in our heads, but the raw experience of life will bring us back to Now. 

Pain won’t let me ignore the present. Pleasure won’t let me ignore the present. For all the convoluted ways we engineer to outrun the one domain of time that can form us, the Now will always have its way. 

And it’s for our good that it does. My heart can’t change in the past. I can’t hear an “I love you” from the future. Everything that can make me into the person I need to be is in one moment—the only moment I can’t ever truly escape. The present is the supreme moment which confronts me with the reality of the past and the future at once. 

Everything that can make me into the person I need to be is in one moment—the only moment I can’t ever truly escape.

One way or another, I’ll eventually be that person who my choices have been forming. I believe we all will be. (More surprisingly, I think I believe we all believe that. Whether or not we’re honest with our present selves about that is another question.) 

In one sense, the person we will be, will be who we’ve always been. 

How will we feel when we can no longer be anyone but the person we are now? 

Where will we go when every moment is Now? 

A time looms when past, present, and future will be known as the eternity that is the absolute Now. When every thread of the timeline of our existence weaves into one indivisible cord—whole from beginning to end, the fabric of our lives displaying inarguably what we are—what will we see?

The grandfather paradox asks if such a cord can snip itself off before it’s unspooled. And if the conclusion drawn is that a moral choice can have eternal significance in the tapestry of someone’s story, then maybe the thought experiment is of some value after all. 

Still, I believe the wiser time traveler is the one who knows—wherever their thoughts take them in time—they are becoming who they’ll always be.