Time has everything to do with how we see our lives and how we live our lives. Each culture on this planet has its own notion of how time should be looked at, how time should be regarded, how it should be utilized and how it should be structured according to what that culture considers important.

We use phrases such as “in a second”-“just a minute”-“take five”-“be back in ten”-“9 to 5”-“24/7.” We have all kinds of clocks on our walls, by our beds, on our wrists, in our cars and even on our phones. In fact, every person on this earth has their own internal clock with their very own way of looking at time.

William Shakespeare lamented: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

But Bertrand Russell declared: “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

Marilyn Monroe proclaimed “I’ve been on a calendar, but never on time.”

Jim Henson as Kermit the Frog put it best by opining: “Time’s Fun When You’re Having Flies.”

Time is like anything else in our lives. It possesses many different perspectives to look at it from, offering the opportunity to approach life in our own unique and positive way.

So now let’s stretch our imaginations in a really fun direction.

Let’s time travel. Because whether we’re having a midnight supper by moonlight on Lake Como or praying towards the east at sunrise in Mecca or having crumpets at tea time in Yorkshire or taking a coffee break in Akron -or even boarding a bullet train in Osaka – the one thing common between all of us on this planet is that singular human curiosity of what it was like in the past-and what it will be like in the future.

Stephen Hawking recently admitted: “Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labeled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.”

So if your consciousness is warmed up from our X-Ray Stretches –let’s get your imagination really limber.

I-STRETCH #2: PRACTICAL TIME TRAVEL

Time is tethered to space. Space is tethered to matter. We will use matter to thread ourselves through time. HG Wells, author of The Time Machine once said “I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.” You have your own scythes to clear away the mysteries of tomorrow –or cut a new path into the past. They’re all around you. So let’s start traveling:

Go outside and find a tree at least one foot thick.
Find a spot near that tree where it’s comfortable to stand or sit, whichever you prefer.
Now stare at the tree.
Think about how old the tree is. Figuring the ring of an average tree equals a 16^th of an inch to a year, a tree one foot thick could be close to two hundred years old.
Now as you stare at the tree—run your vision up and down the length of the span, thinking about how it grew from seed to sprout to sapling to branching out to where it towers now. See that growth at time-lapse speed as if it happened overnight. (Apply your x-ray vision you learned last week and you can even see the root system spreading out, underground, like a shadow to its above surface-self.)
Now reverse that growth. Watch it get younger and smaller. Watch the leaves draw back into buds and the buds into the branches and the branches into themselves and disappear altogether into a shrinking trunk getting younger and younger. That tree is a sapling again and you’ve taken you’re first step two hundred years back in time.
Picture what else is around it. Homes. Meadow. Forest. Farm. It doesn’t matter. Just picture something. If you want, read up on the history of where you live and apply it to this process.
Think of the people who are alive now, two centuries before you are born. People you know from history like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin or Beethoven.
Look -a group of people are having a picnic not far from the sapling. Children are running around playing games. The woman are laying out tablecloths. The men are playing instruments. Look at their clothes. Look at their hairstyles.
Listen to the music. Is that a song you know? Or is it something you’ve never heard before?
Now slowly move forward into time. Watch the tree grow. As it grows-see all the lovers through the decades that carved their initials in the bark of that tree. See the kids that climbed that tree. See the endless generations of birds that nested in that tree.
As you see the tree grow back to its full size in your present time, think of the music that played around this tree for all those generations. As you go up the span you can actually hear those folk songs-those gospel songs-those vaudeville songs-those show songs-those pop songs-those jazz songs those rock songs -those hip hop songs. Stop at any branch and hang around in that time for a while and just listen. You can hear Stephen Foster, Charlie Parker. The Beatles. Dr. Dre.
If you want to go to a specific time-get yourself a coin from that time—1947—74 B.C.—wherever you want to go. Concentrate on it intensely. Don’t merely look at it. Look into it. See the coin first when it was molten metal poured into its mold.
See your coin bright and shiny all over again. Look hard enough and you can see the first hand it went into or what was bought with it.
Look even further and you see the chain of hands this coin has passed through, like the expanse of a massive bridge, traveling through both time and space and through all the events it has survived until it landed-right into your hands.
Want to go back further? Want to picture saber-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths or even brontosauruses? No problem. Just pick up a rock…..Now ask yourself—how old is that rock?….
Want to visit the future? OK, look at your tree again. Watch it grow larger and older and spread out taller and broader.
Borrowing a technique from x-ray vision—look at the buildings around that tree and imagine them gone-with new, futuristic buildings twice and three times their size. See those amazing aircraft-they look like hover cars!
Now combine all these techniques and add to that how you experience your own memories: reliving the sounds, the smells, the actual feelings you remember from every stage of your own life. Now apply that to wherever you choose to time travel whether the past-or the future. And have fun!
Make sure to come back to the same basic time you left from. (Give or take 30 or 60 minutes perhaps.) You don’t want to meet your past or future self and create catastrophic time paradox. Never underestimate the power of your own imagination!

You now have the functional tools for practical time travel.

From now on, when you look at a tree or a coin or even a rock—let alone a clock–you’ll look at it in a different way-and think about what makes up what we call time and space.

There is no limit to what you can do with just a stretch of the imagination.