Please do not read this post if you are a major Harry Potter fan and have not yet read the Cursed Child book. This post is heavily influenced by the book and contains spoilers in the book.
A couple of weeks back, I finished Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the major premise of the book is time travel and what happens when you try to change reality if you go back in time.
In the book, the protagonists of this story, Albus Servus Potter, and Scorpius Malfoy, who are best friends, try to turn time back from an important event in one of the books – the death of Cedric Diggory. They try to do this three times and each time when they turn time back, they arrive back in the present time in an alternative universe, one that has no bearing on their actual present.
So I started thinking ‘What if I managed to get hold of a Time Turner’, what would I do? Initially, I was very excited and started thinking of all the times in my life that, in retrospect, I wished I had done or acted differently. I also wondered how my life would turn out had I changed even one aspect of my life.
Then I read about the
Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
What it means is that small changes in one dimension (or a change in time) multiply and can have a dramatically different effect in the current state in time. This effect is part of the chaos theory.
When I read about this, I started thinking about this – if I did change any part of my life before today, then perhaps, today will not exist. I may be living a completely different world than what I am living today. I probably would not have S, GG or BB in my life!
At every point in our life, we make certain decisions based on our current knowledge. Our today is the sum total of all that knowledge and the cumulative effect of all those decisions. Who we are today, is, therefore the sum of all that we have done – right or wrong – till the now.
This is a similar lesson that Albus and Scorpius learnt. When they tried to stop Cedric from being killed, the reality they came to was completely different from the reality they left.
Let us embrace our current reality and learn to love life as it happens. Everything happens for a reason and this is so true here. When we try to change fate (or reality as it is), reality then throws a curve ball at us….
Memories and Such 