Time travel is logically impossible but it doesn’t make it any less fun to talk about. After attending some graduation banquets and ceremonies on behalf of EventIQ last month,  I have decided I want a do-over of my teen years, like in the movie Peggy Sue Got Married.

Gawd! I’m really showing my age here now — there’s so many other variations on this theme (switching places with your teenage self or son/daughter) since Peggy Sue came out in 1986, but this is my favourite. In the movie, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) is a 43-year-old woman facing divorce who goes to her high school reunion only to faint and wake up in 1960 as a high school senior. There’s no time machine here, no magical hot tub or transporter that sends people backwards in time; just some mystical force at play that gives her a chance to fix her life at the junction where it went wrong.

Peggy Sue married her high school sweetheart, Charlie (Nicholas Cage) in part because she was pregnant, and in part because saw the goodness in this man. As a viewer, the suspense is whether Peggy Sue can rectify the mistakes that led to the disintegration of her marriage? Is there any romantic spark left in their relationship?

I don’t want to spoil the ending for you, but the time travel angle makes you think about what life would be like if you had a chance to revisit part of your past. I find the topic fascinating and alluring — being able to see family members who have since died and take part in events that you have only read about. But I wonder, if you’re going back in time, is high school even where you want to end up? Or would you instead go to Woodstock?

Then again, being in the new/old world would be confusing. Anything you do or say can have ramifications on history. And sometimes, even if you do try to change the past things can still turn out the same (as in George Pal’s 1960 movie Time Machine where a man tries to go back in time and save his lady-love from being killed by a mugger only for her to still die, but in different ways).

The late scientist Carl Sagan pondered the affects of time travel in a PBS interview from 1999: “The idea that going into the past could wipe me out so that I would have never lived is somewhat disquieting. It’s very simply that you travel into the past and murder your own grandfather before he sires your mother or your father, and where does that then leave you? Do you instantly pop out of existence because you were never made?”

Deep stuff. I leave you with one final thought-provoking theory called Richard’s Burrito (from Peggy Sue):

“Time is like a burrito in the sense that one part of itself folds over and just touches the other part.”