5 reasons Linear Time is making us sick
Let me ask you: do you also picture Time as a LINE?
One cold morning back in 2020, I realised the way I was viewing Time was making me sick.
I could see Time as a long line, like a road with nowhere to rest.
The way we view Time is very telling for obvious reasons. How we modelise things impacts all our cognitive functions, which in turn affects how we perceive, organise our thoughts and act.
Most of us have only ever been taught to see Time as a line. Think back to the history lessons with that big flat past-to-present timeline, or just the pages of any diary. Of course, Time as a Line is a necessary and useful construct for organising ourselves in collective activities. Without it, we simply couldn’t do anything together.
But apart from the issue of Linear time being slightly ‘dis-synchronised’ to real cosmic time, creating subtle but huge rifts in our internal rhythms (another topic entirely), the monopoly of Time as a Line is responsible for hidden and profound repercussions in our psyche.
To begin a series of article on circular Time (Kairos not Chronos), the feminine counterpart to linear time, I offer 5 issues for your contemplation.
1. Linear Time is exhausting you
In a life where Time is a Line only, there is always… more time. And more, and more.
Our job is never done.
The road stretches infinitely in front of us.
“It never ends”, as you often hear it. And indeed it does not.
Yet, endings are important. How can we truly rest and regenerate without real endings?
Everything is a cycle in this universe. Everything that exists is born, grows, matures and dies, and on it starts again. Each cycle ‘nourishing’ the next in some way, through universal memory.
We know that Time is more curvy than straight. Yet the modern world lives with this artificially Linear Time and it robs us of fully experiencing completion at the level where our Being meets the cosmos.
A side effect of this is that crazy sensation you get when you have just completed something, and somehow your mind’s already off to the next thing… because tick-tock, Linear Time cannot help but ‘pull you forward’.
When you experience life as a series of cycles instead, each unique (making a spiral), and you move along a cycle, you will naturally find yourself moving up and forward for half the cycle, and downward and backwards for the other half.
What if embracing the intelligence of cycles was enough to plug you back into the rhythm of the cosmos?
2. Linear Time robs you of ever truly arriving
If Linear Time forces you to always move in one direction only, and never arrive, you become an eternal seeker symbolically disconnected from where you started, meaning ‘your source’.
“Arriving” in cyclical time means… returning to where you started.
In Time as a Line, though, your starting point is always behind, so you can never, ever meet it again.
Never “arriving” has profound implications for our wellbeing.
Psychologically, you could say this leaves us perpetually hungry. No wonder we’re never satiated. We’re missing half our geometry! (The circle and the line are the basic shape that make up all other shapes.)
3. Linear Time keeps you forever frustrated
Imagine if instead of trying to fill the gap between where you are and where you want to be, you could feel a full ‘becoming’ instead of a gap, like being in a stretch of time, where the journey and the destination actually feel the same because they’re no longer a gap (the journey) and a dot (the destination) as in Linear Time, they’re both …seasons. (If affirming “it’s about the journey not the destination” isn’t sinking in, now we know why.)
In Cyclic Time, your milestones and precious moments are no longer squeezed onto singular points along the Line of Time, they become entire curved sections of a time cycle. Like the seasons.
A rising season, a blooming season, a celebrating season, a deconstructing season, an empty season…
Curves, curves, curves. Repeating flavours of time, orchastred by greater mysteries…
Can you feel how supportive that feels, knowing what comes next, knowing you get to both grow forward and to come home?
Having time seasons is like having a proper place for everything in your home. There is a time to do, and a time to be. A time to let go, and a time to grasp. Nature knows this.
4. Linear Time warps your personal evolution
If we apply all the above to the realm of personal growth and evolution, we can easily see what never arriving, always having more to do and having no place to rest might do to our sense of Self.
When Time is a Line, your evolution becomes a Line also. The consequences of that may be subtle but devastating indeed simply because who you are now and who you are becoming are conceptually separate.
In other words, you’re constantly a work in progress, with all that implies: when are you supposed to stop ‘direction’ for a minute to celebrate yourself, be proud, worthy and … enough?
How can you be whole if the geometry of the Circle is foreign to you?
5. Linear time makes it impossible to be in two (or more) places at once
This is why many of us struggle to make sense of opposite parts of ourselves, or even the fact that life is a series of ups, downs, nights and days.
The Circle is the framework of life itself.
When everything is arranged linearly, it’s hard to get a whole picture.
The Line gives a false sense of stability. As though things should stay flat or neutral.
Let me make this more practical.
Have you ever felt like you should be ahead of where you currently are?
This is you feeling the whole circle of your being. You know what’s coming. You just do.
How on earth would you know you are meant for more, if you couldn’t feel your whole destiny at some level, regardless of where your human brain tells you is on that story line?
You also have a desire for more, right?
It makes no sense that “more” only means “ahead”. More means more. More needs a whole shape to expand. A Line cannot expand!
Do you also have the inner knowing that your true contentment isn’t hanging in the air ahead of you but lives and plays in the very fabric of Now?
Time as a Line does not allow us to reconciliate these two aspects of our inner Being. The wanting more, and savouring Being in the present. (If these two poles are harmonious in you, then good-on-you, the Circle is alive in you!)
Linear Time forevers holds these poles as paradoxes. When in fact, they are not.
In Circular Time, these two impulses inside you — to go places, to have a bigger impact, to accomplish and conquer; along with the desire to be more present, to refine the quality of your life, to open and be, rather than ‘do’ — both live happily alongside each other, one at the top of the circle, the other at the bottom. Each birthing the other in harmony. Two parts of a whole.
From Time as a Circle, you can yearn for a point ahead of your Time Line AND you can be content with where you are.
Hard to do on Linear Time, don’t you think?
Indeed if that’s difficult to you, then perhaps it is time for you to reclaim your own sovereign Time (not the time determined by the calendar, the boss or modern society).
Follow https://theharvest.substack.com/s/time for more…
