How to Time Travel with Ten-year-olds

and other imaginative people

Last week, my class time traveled.

Inspired by the book How to Fall in Love with the Future, which details work climate activists are doing to playfully get people imagine how it feels and looks if we succeed in keeping the earth cool, we traveled into the 2030 of our dreams.

Humans are good at imagining calamity. It helps us survive, and also we find it exciting. However, one of the jobs of writers and artists is to imagine and articulate possibilities, and I feel it is one of our responsibilities to be bold enough to imagine a future we’d actually want.

(We played with this last year in a different way as well.)

How to Time Travel

First, we wrote up a list of what changes there would be in our ideal 2030. The kids of course had some sci-fi ideas, but I nudged them towards thinking mostly of what problems could have been solved. We wrote them up on the whiteboard in solution form.

My Seattle class’s list. These all came from the children except “Keep the earth cool” and “Racial and gender equality.”

Then, we got out our time machine. Now, I’m lucky enough to own an actual time machine, thanks to my kid, who enjoys recycling art, AKA “thinging.” You may have to use your own ingenuity on this one. You can certainly time travel just using the power of the human brain, but I liked the whimsy and concreteness of the machine.

Working time machine. I tested it myself.

We huddled around our machine, each holding onto a pipe cleaner. We turned the dial (the flosser) four notches into the future. Then we closed our eyes and hummed. I guided us through the years and into a landing.

I had kids keep their eyes closed and move to a place they could sit or lie comfortably. Then I guided them around 2030, guided meditation style.

Where do you find yourself? What do you see around you? How does the air smell? What plants and animals do you see?

You meet a person, and tell them you’re time-traveling from 2026. What do they want to tell you about 2030? Maybe they have a message they want you to take back. Maybe they want to show you something. Follow them while they show you something cool about their world.

They invite you to a celebration. What is it like? Is there food or music? What are people celebrating? Now someone gives you something. Maybe it’s something you can eat. Maybe it’s a present.

Now you meet your future self. What are they like? They take you to their favorite place. Breathe in the air. How does it feel to be there?

Before we go back to our time machine, is there anywhere else you’d like to check out?

Then we make our way back to our time machine, grab the tethers, and hum our way home.

Afterwards, I found we needed a minute. Eating a snack felt useful. Then we took a few minutes to write about our experiences, then to share them. Later, we drew and painted something we’d seen. We also had a conversation about how its important not to let ideas of what is possible stop you from imagining and working towards the world you believe in. Though honestly that conversation may have been more for me than them, as they were deep in the excitement of possibility.

We’re going to continue to work with our reports from our time travel, culminating in an Expo of the Future, which hopefully we will be sharing in some community spaces. Keep posted for more in this project!

What I can say so far

It definitely went some wild directions (“I see Justin Bieber in a beaver costume!” “I rode a woolly mammoth!”) but also the kids were excited about what they were imagining. I’m hoping that it will deepen over the next few weeks.

Personally, I found it to be a surprisingly intense and profound exercise. It was really visceral. One kid even felt some motion sickness. It is SUCH a tender and beautiful thing to see kids’ dreams for the future, knowing the painful complexity of the world. But it also felt really good to touch into my own, and their, embodied sense of what the future could be.

And man, if the kids’ dreams come true, I’d happily dodge some woolly mammoths and as many buck-toothed, furry, has-been teen idols as necessary.