Chapter 73 — The Dangers Of Meditation
The Curve of Time, Chapter 73 —— The Dangers Of Meditation , in which Saskia makes connections while flying to Seattle.
Followed a short confession about where this project is at.
Listen to full episode :
— 73 —
The Dangers Of Meditation
During her flight to Seattle, Saskia realized that while she could speed time up, she couldn’t expedite her travel through any of the other three dimensions. It was weird to have one dimension singled out among the four in which she lived. Sure, she could move more quickly relative to everyone around her if she wanted to, by slowing time down, but even that didn’t help with distances. It sort of did for short distances, in that she could just race over while slowing time. But for longer distances, she was stuck, like everyone else. An airplane was the fastest way to get to Seattle, and she couldn’t speed it up. Yes, she could go back in time and then catch the flight there to get there “faster”, meaning relative to everyone else’s experience. Or she could get there and then go back in time, but neither way made the getting to Seattle any faster for herself.
All the same, Saskia was glad of the time she was being forced to sit still. It gave her time to mull Mica’s implication: that she might have taught Zeno to slip in time, and that, thus, Zeno might have been the one to teach Charles Belfry. Molly Witherspoon too? Was meditation the dangerous root of it all? She had certainly been very relaxed when she first learnt to slip in time.
Who would ever have thought meditation could be so dangerous?
∞
Saskia glanced across the plane and glimpsed Mt Rainier out the window. Out her own window she could see the southern fingers of the Puget Sound nestled within the dense greenery of the landscape below. She rubbed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her flight was the first time she’d stopped moving since ...was she coming down with a cold?
She’d been driving hard. How was it that illness always knew the most inopportune moment to strike? Why always on a flight out of town? Or on a Saturday?
The temporal option to postpone an urgent care visit to Monday was replaced by the physical postponement of her return to LA. But even if she decided to turn time forwards or backwards, that would hardly help; the her living her life was living the conditions. As in the case of travel by flight, time travel didn’t help in this instance.
Were she an epidemiologist, she could have taken the same principle and put it on steroids. She could have taken a rucksack full of antigen home tests back in time, identified where Covid started, and quarantined——really quarantined——the initial cases. Nipped the whole global pandemic in the bud . . . now that might have saved a lot of lives. Australia and New Zealand had proved real quarantines were possible. It was the sort of thing that Mica would have loved.
But she wasn’t an epidemiologist, and reflection surfaced a counter-narrative: that developments in vaccine technology inspired by Covid might actually save more lives in the long run. Causality was complex to mess with.
And what was to say that what she was doing right now wasn’t just as risky?
She sat back in her seat, which she uprighted for landing. All actions had consequences, time travel or not. Suddenly, the unexpected outcome of her encounter with Zeno resonated. If Zeno had passed the ability to slip in time onto his fellow meditation retreat attendees, could meditation be the key? Her interaction with him on his front stoop——that had not been her only encounter with him after all.
Well, that was chapter 73, Friends. I hope you enjoyed it, especially because as I write this, this is the last chapter that I have a finished first draft of!
That is perhaps a slightly dramatic characterization of the state of The Curve of Time, but there is enough truth to it that I feel that I owe you faithful listeners an update. So here goes.
Firstly, don’t panic. The claim I made a couple of weeks ago, that the next dozen or so chapters hold exciting story developments is still true; rest of the the novel is indeed well planned out. It’s more that chapter 74 is in particularly rough shape, what with a few minor tweaks percolating through. And, looking further ahead, while the conclusion of the novel has morphed slightly from the start of this project, the basic framework remains the same.
Still, given my most recent update (of some time ago) when I believe I professed to still having about a dozen chapters already drafted up my sleeve, I could understand how, you might ask, how have we gotten to this point without me acknowledging our newly precarious position? Well, firstly, I had, not just hoped, but expected too, to have more time for writing while on my Aussie galavant. So, mostly it’s just been a case of the best laid plans, being just that: plans, not a view of the future.
More significantly, though, for the eventual book, as I also mentioned a couple of weeks back, I’ve been revising many of the earlier chapters based on some great feedback. So, the good news is that I’m confident that the outcome for the final product will be even more exciting. And, even while my optimism is rising that we won’t have to return to an earlier chapter because the story has unravelled in some diabolical way, I am increasingly seeing this project for what it is: the first draft.
It’s funny how one can delude oneself into hoping that our work product is more than it has a right to be, but there you have it: I am human.
Anyway, with all of that said, I should probably get back to the task at hand, keep this short, and start pulling the next chapter into more readable form.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
