Episode summary
A finished book pulled an old time-travel thought experiment off the back shelf. Two phrases for a worry that sat there for years, and for what you actually stand to lose if you change the road.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless.
If you’re new here, I hope you enjoy your time with me today. If you’ve been with me a while, glad to have you back.
Have you ever had a thought that wasn’t sitting in the forefront of your mind, but never really went away either? Not something you spent your days actively thinking about, but still present, for years, waiting for the right moment to tap you your shoulder. I have, and mine’s been around for over twenty years.
In English, we have a phrase for that: in the back of your mind. In the back of your mind.
Picture a shelf at the back of a closet with something you put there a while ago and mostly forgot about, except you still walk past that closet every single day. When we say something is in the back of your mind, that’s what we mean. You haven’t forgotten it. It’s just not in your field of view, not until something reaches back there and pulls it forward.
This week, a book pulled something off that shelf. I finished The Fires of December while pacing around the church with Eliana, earbuds in, half listening for her and half caught up in the last chapter. If you heard last week, you already know that part. As I buckled her in and pulled out of the parking lot to get her home for a nap, an old thought popped back into my head.
I’ve been drawn to time-travel stories for about as long as I’ve been reading fantasy. The concept is fascinating to me. Going back armed with future knowledge, better prepared for whatever challenges you might need to face. Whenever something got difficult, whenever a stretch of my life felt harder than it needed to be, I’d poke at that question: if I could go back, what would I do or change to overcome this challenge and do better.
The first version of this experiment is older than any of the books. I have this vague, half-formed memory from when I was four or five years old. I took a nap on the floor one afternoon, and then, without any sense of time passing, I was sitting in the car, on the way to finish up errands with my mom. I don’t have a memory of getting up, heading out to the car, and getting buckled up in the car seat. I simply came to awareness already sitting in a seat headed to the grocery store. There’s a strange gap there, less a clear memory than two pieces of film spliced together with a few frames missing in between. For a while, the experiment that grew out of that gap was this: what if all of this, everything I was living through, had actually been a dream, or some kind of glimpse forward into a future life, and I was about to wake up back in my five-year-old body and have to do the whole thing over again from scratch.
Later, after more science fiction and fantasy, it shifted. Not “this was a dream.” More like, what if I was sent back in time. Slightly different mechanism, same supernatural loop.
You may think that this was a way for me to deal with emotionally heavy and traumatic events. That was the case sometimes, but most of the time it was a bit more mundane than that. For example, freshman year I was required to take American Heritage, a course that mixes American history and government into one class. It was a required class that everyone had to take, unless you’d already covered that material through AP classes or concurrent enrollment. Both of those are ways high school kids could earn college credits before graduation. I remember sitting in that classroom thinking I would much rather skip the whole thing and get straight to the subjects I actually wanted to study. If I could go back, I told myself, I’d have taken the right high school courses to walk right past that requirement.
December, in the book, lands on her twenty-first birthday. My earliest version of this lands far before that. Reading her jump didn’t invent this question. It just pulled an old one back to the front of my head.
But as I got back home and put Eliana down for her nap, I had a new perspective on this thought experiment. It’s hard to know what kind of cascading effect small, seemingly simple decisions can have on what comes next. We often call this butterfly effect, one wing beat in the wrong place and the storm shows up somewhere else entirely. I couldn’t help thinking that anything I changed about my past could potentially lead to a present without Eliana, and that’s not the life I’d want to live. That thought followed me right into the rest of the afternoon, including the unconventional nap.
Lately she’s been waking up from her afternoon nap earlier than she should, usually after about forty-five minutes instead of the full one and a half or two hour stretch. So I’ve taken to going into her room, picking up the pack-and-play, that’s the portable crib she sleeps in, and carrying the whole thing out to the living room. She’s still tired at that point. She just doesn’t want to be alone in a quiet room by herself. Out in the living room, with me nearby, she falls back asleep for another hour and a half or so, which usually gives me enough of a stretch to get something done.
This time, I sat down at the computer during that stretch and did some research. I’m working on formalizing how I teach, trying to move from instinct to something closer to a method. That particular afternoon, the topic was communication strategies, meaning the things you do in a second language when you don’t actually have the word you need. How you keep a conversation moving instead of letting it petter out and die. I was reading research on whether teaching those strategies on purpose, rather than just hoping students pick them up naturally, actually helps, and how you’d go about practicing them in a real classroom, instead of only talking about the theory of them. None of it was groundbreaking on its own, but it’s the kind of unglamorous work that eventually turns into a better lesson plan.
She slept. I read papers. She woke up, and when it was time, we drove to Texas State to pick up Emma. That’s the weekday rhythm around here. I drop her off in the morning, and I pick her up again in the afternoon. This was that same drive home after pickup, nothing special about the route itself, the same commute I make most afternoons. What was different was the conversation.
As I mentioned last week, I always want to talk to her after I finish a book, whether it’s a good one or a bad one. This time, though, I wasn’t mostly talking about the plot, or the characters, or the prose, all of which I thought were genuinely good. I was talking about what the book had me turning over in my head on the drive home. I already try to tell Emma that I love her and that I appreciate her on a regular basis, it’s not a rare event around here. But this was another opening to say it, and to tell her how lucky I feel about the way our life has turned out, that I wouldn’t change a thing about how we got here.
That question about editing the road stopped being abstract on that drive home, because now there’s something specific I might actually lose if it was ever actualized, or made a reality. English has a word for exactly that kind of risk: at stake. In English, when you say something is at stake, you mean it’s what you actually stand to lose if things go the other way. Picture a table full of poker chips sitting in the middle. Whoever’s playing that hand isn’t just passing the time for fun. Every chip on that table represents something with real value they hope not to lose, and the moment they push it forward, the game stops being casual. There’s something real riding on the outcome, and everyone at the table knows it. In poker those chips represent the stakes, real money. Sometimes a lot of money. Here’s what’s sitting in the middle of my table. It’s honestly hard to wrap your head around: edit the road, even in some small way, change one decision far enough back, and I’m not just rewriting a semester or a language requirement anymore. I might be rewriting Eliana right out of the story entirely, out of existing at all. That’s what’s at stake now, in a way that simply wasn’t at stake before she existed. The old version of this thought experiment only ever cost me a boring class. This version costs everything. It’s evening time and Eliana is back in her room asleep for the night in that same pack-and-play I hauled out to the living room this afternoon. That’s what’s at stake. Not a scheduling problem from freshman year.
So here’s a question, if you want to sit with it: what are the things in your life that you wouldn’t want to lose if you had to do it all over again? Is it worth keeping the imperfections, just to make sure you still get to keep them?
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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