Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

A Timetraveler’s Side Quest.

The Fool, “as she likes to call herself, when she is venturing into something new”, has returned.

Not quite to where she left from, of course. Time has been busy while she was away.

More than two and a half years, can apparently be both an age and barely a moment, depending on which frame you happen to be standing in.

I have been carrying a rather peculiar travel companion lately: the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

The first word that caught my attention was emotivism.

As a useful reminder that what we feel, what we believe, and what we know are not necessarily the same thing. A small distinction, perhaps, but one with rather large consequences.

What happens when we mistake our feelings about something for knowledge of the thing itself?

Then came inertial frame, in some era on would speak of timeline lag.

I liked this one immediately.

Time doesn’t stand still for anybody. We move through it whether we intend to or not. But moving through time and growing through it are different adventures entirely.

Perhaps that is one of the strange things about returning.

The places and faces may still look familiar. The old maps may still work. Yet somewhere along the way, the traveller has changed, and so has everyone else.

There are no neat little arrows showing where the changes occurred.

Somewhere between standing still and skipping frames, we simply arrive, even when some experienced it differently. Everyone has been travelling, but nobody has been watching the other’s journey, or did they?

And then there was the train rides, from one city to another.

Travel has a peculiar habit of putting people beside one another who would probably never have met otherwise. A conversation began, continued, and eventually became one of those small encounters that refuses to explain itself.

I didn’t come away with an answer, but with a suitcase full of new questions, and renew kind of wonder, and a heart full of romance.

Which, considering the traveller I have become, may be the more appropriate souvenir.

The last and a new concept, “thank you to my friend on the train” we arrive at salva veritate: preserving truth while changing the expression.

Perhaps life is full of these substitutions. We return to an old place but are no longer the person who left it. We remember an old story but hear it differently.

We encounter someone unexpectedly and can know that something happened without deciding exactly what it meant.

A conversation can be meaningful without becoming a prophecy. A wave can simply be a wave.

Or it can become a question. I think I am becoming rather fond of questions.

The Fool once thought the next journey required a map.

The Magician suggested tools.

Gentleman Jack, meanwhile, seems to have discovered that sometimes the most useful thing to carry is an unanswered question from a nearby platform. As the adventure is still unfolding and live is not about the destination but the journey, the road not taken and the delays spent in togetherness.

©Elke T.B. Stevens 23/08/26