Day 23: Time is Not Always Linear (And Neither Is Your Life)

ByJessica Simpkins, MD
undersea photo of wavy, red-orange organism

My brain is still processing the whirlwind of this past week. On the bright side, I don’t have cervical cancer! Yayyy!!

Some weeks we have more to deal with than we have time in the day. In those weeks, we let other things slide. For example, I didn’t write a newsletter this week, nor did I write a blog post every day of the week. But that’s ok.

Life is cyclical. There are times when things are going well, and times when you feel like you’re drowning in chaos. Sometimes life is boring, other times it’s a whirlwind of excitement. There are new beginnings and bittersweet (or sometimes god-awful) endings.

We tend to think of life and time as a linear process, especially as members of society. When we’re children, we have developmental milestones to meet. We go to school and progress through the grades until we graduate from high school. 

We continue this illusion of life being linear. After high school, many of us go to college, or trade school, or we get a job. Many aspire to be married, buy a house, have kids. There are more and more boxes to check off as time marches on.

But a lot of life is actually cyclical. As Steven Moffat writes for Dr. Who, “People assume time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.”

Then we have the writers of The Good Place, where in season 3, episode 5 Michael explains to Eleanor that “in the afterlife time doubles back and loops around and ends up looking something, like… Jeremy Bearimy. This is the timeline in the afterlife. Happens to kinda look like the name Jeremy Bearimy in cursive English, so that’s what we call it.”

My point is, it’s not always helpful to us to look at time as only being linear. We have things that happened in the past that may affect us in the future in unexpected ways, or ways we never come to understand. We have beginnings and middles and ends happening simultaneously.

When we embrace the reality that time is not purely linear, it removes the pressure to check off all of these boxes. The two certainties we have are that we were born, and we will one day die. Everything else in between is a mystery and great adventure.

There is no rule book we are born with which tells us exactly what to do in life. And while that is sometimes super frustrating, it also means that each one of us is free to make up the rules of our own life. Yes, in order to live in society, there are certain societal rules we must follow (i.e. laws). 

But beyond those concrete laws set up by society, we are free to make up much of how we live our lives. Every single one of us is making things up as we go along. We are free to change our minds, try different things, and make new decisions. 

Perfection is an illusion many of us chase, but none of us can live a ‘perfect’ life. We can only live our own lives. And we get to decide what that means for us on an individual level.

Embracing the messiness of time and the messiness of our own lives allows us to show up in the world with more compassion for ourselves and others. We can learn to love the imperfection and whimsy that is this “big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.” And in turn, we can learn to love our imperfect, crazy lives.

Dr. Jess has been finding herself on one adventure after the next since quitting residency in September of 2021. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her 3-year-old rescue dog, Lola. Dr. Jess blogs about her experiences, advice for times of transition, and whatever else tickles her fancy.

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