"About Time": Who Needs Do-Overs Anyway?

Time travel is often used in movies to solve problems. 

In Avengers: Endgame, for example, time travel is used to save the half of the world they lost in the previous movie. Our heroes travel back through time gathering infinity stones from different periods to return to the present and save the day!

But what if time travel wasn’t a good thing? 

About Time is a favorite film of mine because it shows you that time travel isn’t so magical or something to be desired.

In the movie, Tim, the protagonist played by Domhnall Gleeson, comes from a family where the men can travel back in time to any previous event simply by going into a dark room and clenching their fists. 

The appeal is obvious. What if you could fix any mistake you ever made?

I can think of countless occasions where this would come in handy. There are the times in elementary school where a kid on the playground said something mean, and I thought of a good comeback hours later. There are the papers in high school and college where I wish I would’ve started them earlier to not be up at 2 am figuring out what I want to write about.  

You can relive the positive events too. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just pop back in time to relive UVA’s national championship run in 2019? Your favorite moments could be like immersive YouTube videos for you to slip into whenever you’d like.

It’s not so easy, though.

Tim quickly finds out that there are reasons you don’t want to mess with the past, no matter how awful it might be. 

When his sister gets in a car accident, Tim tries to undo the event. The repercussions of this trickle forward to the birth of his child. When the accident happens, he has a baby girl. Without the accident, a boy is born. Tim messes with fate to find that his child becomes someone else entirely. The idea is similar to that of the butterfly effect.

The magic of About Time is that it makes you appreciate life the way it is. Messy. Beautiful. Tragic. Chaotic. 

When we’re living a certain event, positive or negative, we have no idea what it will lead to. Perhaps a bad day will be nothing more, but it’s possible it leads us somewhere better. We simply can’t know in the present. 

Before Tim’s dad passes away in the movie, he offers up some advice to his son. He tells Tim to live every day twice: first let it play out as normal, then relive it paying particular attention to the good within the tedium.

Tim follows his father’s advice for some time, teaching himself to look for the good on the second pass of each day. After some time, Tim stops time-traveling altogether, choosing instead to appreciate life as it is on the first pass.

This realization to me is more magical than time travel. Looking for the good is a skill that can be honed just like learning to paint or play a sport. Tim teaches himself to do this as he relives each day until he gets to the point where it’s second nature. 

We look for what we want to see. You might’ve heard the anecdote where if you look for yellow cars, you’ll see a bunch. Life is similar. If we look for the bad, we’ll certainly find it, yet the same applies for the good.

About Time takes this seemingly desirable ability (time travel) and shows us how it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. 

Yea, it might be nice to relive some of the best moments, but there’s beauty in knowing that everything that happens to you is only happening this one time. We can think back on memories, but we truly only possess the present moment.

I love About Time because it reminds me that life is meant to be lived in the now, that no matter how good or bad things may be, we have no idea where they might lead us.

Next time something good happens, I’ll try to remind myself to experience it and enjoy it fully. Same with the bad. 

While Tim chooses to live life without going back in time, we only get this one chance like it or not. We don’t get do-overs. 

But then again, who needs them?