The Lesson of the Time Bike

If you skip past the bad, you may also skip past the good (or the important).

As a teenager, I read The Time Bike by Jane Langton. The main character is a kid in school, and he found a bike that can fast forward himself through time. It's not exactly time travel -- he, or at least a version of himself, still goes through his life without being "away", so to speak. But his consciousness moves forward past those events, so he isn't actually consciously experiencing them.

He uses this to skip past an exam for a class at school. Using the time bike will let him skip ahead to after he's already taken the test -- so he doesn't have to live through the bore and stress of preparing for and taking the test.

But when he arrives on the other end, he finds out that he took the test... and failed it.

Apparently the un-time-bike version of himself (who still lived linearly through his life while his consciousness skipped ahead) did not adequately study for the exam and just did not do well.

Presumably, if he hadn't skipped ahead, he would have studied for the exam and done well on it. But I guess you can't predict what the un-self will do.

This lesson has floated in my head since I read the book, and it occasionally comes to mind for one reason or another -- usually when I imagine that I want to skip ahead past something boring, stressful, or troublesome. But the lesson of the Time Bike reminds me that I must live through the events moment by moment, and be fully present, and not turn away in fear, hesitancy, or timidity -- it is through my complete presence that things will come to pass in the way that they must. If I am not there, if some un-self version of me is there instead, then I may not like the result once I arrive on the other end. I may also miss out on positive aspects of the experience which I should want my conscious mind to live through.

The lesson of the Time Bike is that you should not use the Time Bike.