Travelling is probably the greatest example of, or the greatest way to experience, time as non-linear. I spent just under two months exploring three countries in South East Asia. There were many trains, planes, boats, buses. Some overnight, some cutting through the day. I spent about seven weeks continuously going somewhere, and always somewhere I had never been before. Time stretched out, time seemed to skip a beat, time went in a blink and now it feels like a dream.
This is the weirdest part. On Saturday 21st April I woke up on Koh Lanta in southern Thailand and 36 hours and three planes later I arrived at my home in Buckinghamshire, England. And then, all of a sudden, it was like I had never left at all. Asia was a long and lovely dream. It was as if I had pressed pause on my house. I was back again and we started where I had left it.
Perhaps it is all made weirder by self-isolation. I was constantly moving and now I cannot even go to the shops without good reason. Did that all really happen? The pictures keep telling me that it did.
I can close my eyes and I can see everything that I saw. I can open them and it is like I never left. I am going back and forth and back and forth and yet I turn and I look at the sunlight on my bed and the open window and do all those places even exist?
The smells, the loudness, the quietness of the waves on the beach, the people, the tastes, the colours. They were all so different from where I come from. But I saw it. I went and felt it. And now I have this long and lovely dream and time is no longer one straight line. And how lucky I have been.
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