The News From Poughkeepsie – Day 86

Time travel works like this:

It’s all about meditation, about connecting to the every moment in your life. Properly meditating, you can time-travel, experiencing the moments that have happened and will happen in your life as if they were the present. It’s not something you can pick up after a few yoga classes, or anything. But if you practice for years, for decades, you can travel through the times of your own experiences.

Sam Aragones hadn’t heard of this before he interviewed the Kesan Sech, the exiled religious leader of the enslaved Creteni people. And he wasn’t quite sure why the Kesan was telling him this at the beginning of his interview. Things got even stranger when the Kesan told Sam that she could focus her meditation to such a degree that she could travel in time past her birth and death, and watch the world before she was born and long after she would be gone.

And this was the problem, the Kesan said. For she had traveled many lifetimes into the future and every time she was confronted with the same, sorrowful truth: the Creteni would never be free. Not in a year, not in a hundred, not in a thousand, not in ten thousand. Understanding that you will be a slave in your lifetime is one thing, but losing the hope of the future? That had been devastating.

“Why are you telling me this?” Sam asks.

“Because,” said the Kesan. “I’ve seen what you do with this information…”