Time, Thoughts and You

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Dear friend,

I hope you’re doing well.

Tell me something. Have you ever felt stuck in life? Like in a loop? Experiencing problems you thought you had solved? Encountering traumas you thought you had overcome? Breaking down for people you thought you had forgotten?

Well, I have. And I’m guessing at some point you must have as well, right?

Have you ever wondered why that happens? Why life keeps you in a circle? Why the universe repeats the same lessons over and over again? And why, no matter where you go, the ghosts of yesterday always seem to catch up?

It doesn’t make any sense, right? Why should you suffer for things you worked so hard to heal yourself from? What happened on that stage, in front of your peers, 8 years ago, shouldn’t be the reason for you to wake up in the middle of the night, right?

But we both know it sometimes is.

To understand why we first need to decode the nature of time & the working of our minds.

In the context of infinity, time operates in a cycle. Every unit of time falls back on itself sooner or later. The clock hands move in a circle. The week flows in a loop. Even months of the year keep repeating. The Earth rotates around itself every day. It revolves around the sun in the same orbit year after year. Seasons come and go every 12 months at fairly similar periods. 

(Give the climate crisis a rest for a second. I’m trying to make a point here.)

Though the argument makes sense, we never think of time as cyclical. Instead, our minds perceive time to be linear. And rightly so. Our lives don’t progress in a cycle. Not scientifically, at least. We are born, we age, and inevitably die. That’s as straight as a line can be.

But if you zoom out, you’ll understand that life and death also follow a circular pattern. We think linear because, as individuals, we are alive only for a single cycle of life and death. The next one begins once we end. Take one loop of infinity, cut it from the middle, lay it flat, and boom, you get the graph of thinking.

Because of our hysterically limited perception of the cosmos, our minds presume progress to follow a linear graph as well. If you put in 10 days of work, you expect to reap 10 days worth of benefits. Sounds fair, right? 

But that almost never happens. In fact, there’s a good chance that on the 11th day, you’ll find yourself back on square one.

Our mind tells us we ought to be moving ahead, but time makes us feel like we’re going in circles. 

This gap between what we think should happen and what we feel is happening causes a lot of unhealthy suffering.

To overcome this, we need to acknowledge that, like everything else, there’s a difference between our thoughts, our feelings, and reality. Progress isn’t linear. And by definition, progress isn’t cyclical either. In fact, progress is spiral. A mix of both.

This spiral perspective is beautiful. It creates enough room for the paradox to co-exist. It tells us that we can move forward yet feel stuck. It suggests that we might experience the same traumas, but their magnitude declines over time. The demons might not get tinier, but your perception sure gets broader. That, my friend, is growth.

If you’re reading this, please remember that progress follows a spiral graph. Don’t beat yourself up the next time you catch yourself going in a circle. Instead, pause for a moment and ask yourself if your troubles bother you as much as they used to? If they do, give yourself more time or seek some external help. If they don’t, pat yourself on the back, for you are moving forward.

Let me know your view ?

Until next time,

Aryan.