There will always be moments in life that you would want to relive.  Maybe because it was so terribly embarrassing that you would want to re-do it so that the outcome of your actions are different, or maybe it’s because for one precious moment, everything was perfect.  Maybe you want to live that perfection again.  The Richard Curtis film, About Time, is all about reliving and redoing moments in life.  In the film, Tim, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is told by his father that the men in his family can travel back in time after they turn 21.  This time travel is nothing drastic.  He can only travel within his own lifetime, and nothing he does really affects the grand scheme of things.  His time travel only affects his own life.  

Obviously, Tim does not believe his father at first but after he travels for the first time, he begins to think about what he wants to use his new talent for.  Tim, being a hopeless romantic, uses his time travel to try to find someone to fall in love with, and that someone happens to be Mary.  The film spreads throughout the course of their relationship, from newlyweds to parents.  Sometimes Tim will travel back in time to redo a moment in which he didn’t quite know what to say, or to help out a friend.  One of the most important uses for time travel however, is to relive parts of a day.  While it doesn’t seem all that grand, it sparks something in me.  This use of time travel within an ordinary life reveals that each mundane moment of life is perfectly intricate and absolutely worth being fully present for.  

I find that we tend to look past the mundane moments of life because we see them as boring.  After Tim’s father passes away from cancer, he starts to follow a bit of advice his father gave to him just before he passed away.  He told Tim to relive each day, something that he viewed as the “secret to happiness.”  While Tim views work and routine as boring or upsetting the first time around, the second time he is able to grasp the small nuances that make life sweet. He’s able to see how a change in attitude and observation throughout the day can make it so much better.  

A part of life that I’ve always struggled with is recognizing that every moment lived is over almost as soon as it starts.  Maybe it’s because I didn’t used to think much when I was younger, but I only recently started thinking about this fact, when I was 18 years old.  The fear of losing memories over time slowly crept over me as I started to live more, because how can you possibly retain it all?  Every beautiful moment that you experience in life will eventually fade away, and all that you can do is accept it.  It’s hard at first.  My first reaction is to hold on tight to the memories and never let go, but eventually, different memories grab a hold of you, and suddenly they are slightly more important than the others.  The concept of About Time struck me so deeply the first time I watched it because change has never been easy for me.  If I could relive certain moments in life, I would, but I’m afraid that I’ll get stuck.  Reliving moments over and over again would only make it so much harder to let go, and one of the harder parts of life that I’m currently in the midst of figuring out is that you have to let go in order to move on.  I find what Tim says at the end of the film really fascinating.  He reveals that he no longer travels back in time, and lives everyday as if it’s the last day of his “extraordinary, ordinary life.”  I want to achieve living that way at some point in my life. 

One of the best parts of the film is nestled towards the end, when Tim and Mary are having their third child.  Tim’s father has since passed, and the thing with time travel is that if you travel in time beyond the moment of the birth of a child, every time you come back you will have a different child (based on the intricacies of reproduction.)  Mary is nine months pregnant, and Tim realizes that this is his last moment to time travel before the moment he is currently in.  So he goes back to a moment with his father, knowing that this will be the last time he will ever see him.  It’s sad, but comforting at the same time.  His father, having the same ability as his son, knows exactly what’s going on after a while and proceeds to ask if Tim would like to go for a walk, and if they do everything carefully and leave everything exactly the way it was, then nothing will change.  So they both go back a decade or so into the past and Tim is a child again, able to walk along the shore with his father in perfect childhood bliss for one last time.  It’s one of the best scenes in the film in my opinion, and really encapsulates the message of the movie.  Even though the film is technically labeled a romantic drama, I think there’s so much more to it than that.  It’s mostly about learning how to live life to the fullest, with the help of a touch of magical realism.