The Myth of the Linear Path

There are moments when something from the past rises with the same intensity it once had, and the mind rushes to explain it as regression, as though time were a straight line and you somehow walked backward on it, as though progress were something that could be undone by a single reaction, memory, or familiar pull in the body.

I first started circling this question long before I had language for it. I met my best friend when I was seventeen during a yoga teacher training that neither of us had any business being in at that age, and we clicked almost immediately. She asked, half-serious and half-amused, “So what’s the difference between enlightenment and depression?” It’s a question we still laugh about, mostly because neither of us was joking.

We spent a lot of time walking without a destination, talking ourselves in circles around the same questions. At some point we noticed something that unsettled us. The dilemmas we were facing felt familiar, and the insights we thought were new sounded like things we’d said before. It didn’t feel like repetition exactly. It felt like return.

We called it a spiral, not as a philosophy, but as a way to make sense of what we were noticing. Life didn’t seem to move forward cleanly. It curved back on itself, with the same themes showing up again and again while the way they landed kept changing.

For a while, we thought that if we could recognize the pattern early enough, reflect deeply enough, or articulate it clearly enough, we might finally exit the spiral altogether. We even started a private blog, as if naming the thing might dissolve it.

It didn’t.

What changed instead was subtler. We stopped being surprised when the same material resurfaced, and over time we stopped assuming that its return meant something had gone wrong.

Time, as it is actually lived, does not behave like a straight line. What shaped you under pressure does not stay politely behind you, and experiences that organized your nervous system when you were younger don’t retire simply because insight arrived later. They remain available, not only as memories, but as ways of orienting to the world that can reassert themselves when present conditions resemble the past.

This is often misread as being stuck, broken, or behind.

What is actually happening is the body responding to what it recognizes, not because it is confused, but because it remembers how to survive. The nervous system does not track chronology so much as it tracks cues—tone, proximity, pacing, threat—and when those cues echo something earlier, time folds.

That folding can be quiet, showing up as a tightening before you know why, a sudden certainty that something familiar is about to happen, or an urge to manage, appease, withdraw, or brace. It can also be loud, with old relational patterns snapping back into place, emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to the present moment, or a sense of being younger inside yourself than you expected.

When this happens, it’s easy to turn on yourself, to analyze, to ask why it’s still here, or to assume that if something returns, it must not have been handled properly the first time.

When time is not linear, return does not automatically mean failure.

Earlier experiences don’t disappear when they are understood. They tend to lose influence when the present is strong enough to be felt as present, when the system can register that what once required protection no longer does. That recognition does not come from explanation so much as it comes from contact.

This is why someone can know they are safe now and still feel unsafe in their body. The knowing belongs to one moment in time, while the response belongs to another, and both can exist at once without canceling each other out.

There can be something relieving about letting this be true. The pressure to be finished softens, and the idea that healing should follow a clean arc loosens its grip. What replaces it is a different relationship to recurrence, with less urgency to get rid of what shows up and more curiosity about what conditions are being remembered.

Time not being linear also means that access can return unexpectedly. A sense of ease, connection, or intactness may appear without effort and disappear just as quietly. These moments are easy to dismiss and are often treated as exceptions rather than evidence.

They matter, not because they need to be sustained, but because they remind us that what feels distant has not been lost.

When the past shows up, it does not mean the present has disappeared. It means something old is meeting something newer than it has ever encountered before, a nervous system with more capacity, more options, and more room.

That meeting doesn’t happen by forcing time forward. It happens by staying where you are long enough for the system to register it, not as an idea, but as an experience.

When that happens, even briefly, time loosens its hold, not because it has been mastered, but because it has been reoriented. The past still exists, the future still pulls, and the present becomes inhabitable again, not as a conclusion, but as a place you can stand without bracing.