Meeting people is a form of time traveling. 

Yesterday, a blue-capped boy walked up to me asking for directions to a nearby subway station. He seemed genuinely happy when we could talk despite different languages through his own translation app. Suddenly, I felt myself pulled back twenty years. I was a naive Korean boy who had just moved to the U.S., sitting in a middle-school classroom. I felt the same excitement when I talked to an American classmate with my Korean-English dictionary for the first time.

A similar experience happened at a hot spring a few days ago. I sat in a 40-degree Celsius hot spring, surrounded by fifty old men whose average age seemed close to seventy. It was steamy and strangely intimate.

Immersed in the hot water, I couldn’t help but notice the old men with imperfect bodies giving off a strong, relaxed aura. I spend so much time and money trying to stay fit, but I guess that only matters at my age, I thought. During the 30-minute session, I felt like I was looking at my future self, and their glances at me felt like they were looking at their past selves. 

Sometimes, I feel like I am standing at an intersection of many timelines when I am in crowded places like school, meetups, and offices. When I look at others, I see my past self from years ago, and perhaps, without realizing it, I also see my future self. From this perspective, I can now listen to the advice from experienced people more genuinely and less skeptically, because their desire to help may simply stem from the connection with their younger selves. Likewise, I feel more willing to do small acts of kindness if I know that I am simply helping my past self.

If we want a glimpse of ourselves in five years, we don’t need a time machine. We only need to look for the places where our future selves exist. In that sense, we have been time traveling since childhood, quietly, indirectly, and imperfectly through interactions with people—just not in a literal sense.