I met a trusted friend today, the first contact after a few years. I had dinner at their place. Asking about what several of our common-friends have been up to in the past several years – i.e. essentially for me to receive an oral history of the recent past times – everyone has been up to pretty much on-brand stuff, and the way I feel like I relate to them, feels so very similar as how it felt back in the day. In a way, nothing has changed.

My travels have brought, and will bring, me, in rather quick succession (over the course of a month), over almost all “worlds” I have lived in – yes, I am a person of many lives. On the bus back from town, finally the weather has become warm once again, like how summer was “supposed to be”, and I was finally able to relax a bit, instead of worrying about staying dry and warm. In my headphones, plays the daytime Yle Radio Suomi, they talk about some random news or topics around Finland, such as about the investigation of the cutting of the communications cable by the Chinese ship a month ago (hs.fi). Outside the bus window, various decrepit old houses typical of Wellington pass by as my bus drives, the houses’ outer paint flaking off their slowly-rotting wooden panels.

I from time to time, when living in one life, imagine what is going on right that instance in the other space and time of one of my other lives – as I do the dishes in Helsinki, I wonder, what’s happening in the other side of the world? Is everything still as familiar as I remember? If I teleported back, would I feel out-of-place? Would it feel jarring for me? … As it turns out, it wasn’t jarring at all. All lives progress forward – exactly in just the way you would expect. Just because I go away, it doesn’t mean that the time of the local life would somehow magically pause.

To imagine is easy, but to continue to imagine, to simultaneously imagine multiple timelines that are concurrently progressing – that’s less easy. It’s in fact quite a challenge in empathy: what would people be up to? How would they feel? There’s a way in which it feels similar to how I wouldn’t be able to care about the feelings of (too) many people all at once. I just don’t have the (mental/emotional) capacity. In a way, I may have created/forked-out more lives than I can effectively manage. To keep all the relationships alive, to stay up-to-date about the happenings and realities and “staying in touch” at least to some extend to the local events – have I perhaps bitten off more than I could chew.