Is healing an infinite quest?
“Healing isn’t linear.” “You’re never fully healed.” These are phrases that connect healing to time, and if you’ve been on a healing journey, you’ve probably heard them before.
These phrases embody how healing is a part of being on this Earth - always a process over time and never a finite outcome. At the same time, I don’t really hear anyone talking about the what time has to do with healing aside from these sayings being the beginning, middle, and end of a conversation.
Time itself is a mother of a concept to imagine, literally and figuratively. Between the abstract and the everyday, the quantum and the deadlines, the stillness and the urgency, we tend to just look at what’s next on our calendar and *maybe* see if we can squeeze in a meditation or a moment of stillness.
I recently read Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell (library), The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (library), and I watched A Trip to Infinity on Netflix. These have all been recent companions as I reconfigure my perception of measuring time, using time, and remembering time. Recently, when I spoke to a few colleagues about how I was reading more about this subject, I said it made me want to be a time bender. One person heard “time vendor”, and we all laughed. I joked that if I could do that, I’d quit my job because I’m sure there would be high demand. And yet, after learning more about it, I don’t think I’d be my first customer–I’ve come to appreciate the gifts of time, even though it carries so much baggage.
The title of Odell’s Saving Time is a double entendre. Are we shaving off minutes and time hacking or are we literally saving the concept from the ways it has been colonized and homogenized? I imagine a clock falling into an ocean, it’s hour and minute hands reaching up for someone to rescue it, hoping it’s not someone from Wall Street or the White House.
Saving Time reinforces how Earth time is not Outlook Calendar time. Earthly markers of time—the way a bird looks during a specific season, where it is flying, the sediment on rocks, how seemingly useless weeds offer messages—can actually make time feel like it’s stretching, bending, collapsing, or stopping. When I think about the robust interdependence of this Earth–the way mushrooms affect rain which affects our drinking water which affects everything–I’m thinking less about how much time it takes for all that to happen and more about the relationships that allow it. When I think about how it has been almost 10 years since I separated from my now ex-husband, I think about how I moved from Chicago to LA, leaving the only geographic area I knew, separating from my mom, an immigrant from monsoon-laden Mumbai, who had lost her husband a couple years before, only for her to leave Chicago winters for Southern California shortly after me. These geographic moves, imprints, and (dis)connection inform how and what we remember, create grooves in our nervous systems, and reflect the systems that contributed to those global shifts.
The Order of Time talks about how any event, including ourselves, is an event that result from a previous order of events. I often think about how I wouldn’t even exist had the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 never passed. Colonialism, American imperialism, and racism was the trifecta that extracted and excluded so I could eventually be included. Erasing human relationship with the land erases how the Earth is a clock in itself. Erasing each other, through enslavement, colonialism, war, patriarchy, gender, ableism, and classism changes how certain people are allowed to enjoy leisure and other people have to labor. Odell invites a correlating question here, “Who’s timing who?” I am convinced that any movement of liberation is deeply connected to being able to reclaim how you use your time. And how you use your time affects how much time you have to heal. Time has helped me have compassion for my mom, who didn’t have the resources I have to ground myself, make liberatory decisions, and step away from cultural projections.
My healing journey is deeply entrenched in my mother wound, being an immigrant daughter, and battling the patriarchy. Whether it was about wearing something too “revealing”, staying silent while I watched men sit around while women labored in the home, or pedestalizing boyfriends who were only mediocre, I spent a lot of time with the world telling me that I had to be smaller in order to fit. At 30 years old, I was in a marriage that had been challenging yet also had its beautiful moments. I lived in Chicago and started a new career I thought would carry me through motherhood. I thought I’d never leave Chicago because my family and his family lived in the area. Yet, ten years later, I celebrated my 40th birthday by visiting the Redwoods with my long-term boyfriend, who I met in my new home of Los Angeles. I had no plan of marrying or having children, and I just started my own business. Twenty-five percent of my life passed, and it was totally different.
Yet it feels “just like yesterday” that I had this completely different life, a life I was conditioned to lead. The life I lived in those first 30 years was full of hypervigilance and allowing other people’s priorities to stop me from knowing my own. I felt like I was experiencing a new birth when I left my husband as 32 years old. As I look back to that time, I perceive my life to be made up of only three years:
First year: before I left for college (actually 18 years)
Second year: college and early adulthood (actually 13 years)
Third year: when my dad unexpectedly died and I got divorced (actually 1 year)
That last year threw me for a loop, with my dad’s death being an event that revealed how my husband couldn’t show up for me. I usually don’t remember specifics about particular years, but I can tell you what happened during each month of 2013. And I could also tell you moments of that year when time stopped, when it exploded, and when it bubbled up with joy followed by ruin.
Healing is not linear. I learned this after years of therapy, coaching, and self-reflection. I have felt on top of the world, like a new human, even while my body gifted me arthritic pains that slowed me down and aged me double. I have felt on top of the world, only to cry the next day because a new layer of grief or anger found space to exist. Whatever feels like “going backwards” is actually a spiral cycle outside of temporality. And even as I looked at the shit left behind and the shit left to come, I could only see it from that momentary perspective. It’s not how it looked the year before, and it looked differently the year after. It’s not just that healing isn’t linear, time isn’t exactly linear - we are just taught that it is. Everything is relative to a point in time and this constantly changes. You’re never fully healed because change won’t allow anything to stop. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s what life has given us. Spirals might seem infinite, but this characteristic is less important than what is happening within it and how you relate to it. This is how I choose to spend my time.
A collage created by Nisha which integrates personhood with time, movement, and beauty.
In A Trip to Infinity, the concept of infinity is investigated through shapes, quantum physics, and the cosmos with cute corresponding animations. At one point, a scientist is given a glass globe to hold, and he’s asked if he was holding infinity. He responded that you can’t view it that way because it’s like looking at infinity’s shadow. As a human, we cannot conceptualize it as if it were in front of us, so even trying to imagine it from that perspective will be completely different than if we were outside of it. Yet if we were outside of it, we wouldn’t exist. As Rovelli writes in The Order of Time, it’s like asking how much a musical note weighs, it’s not a logical question. Reflecting about looking at infinity’s shadow evokes the human-centric nature of these questions and explorations about time and infinity and space. So much is beyond us, even if we are within it. Yet what the documentary did explore was the awe we feel when we look at nature, shifting infinity from being a mathematical concept to being a feeling. But maybe it’s not a shift, perhaps they are equivalent. In the end, the documentary invites the cliche, yet powerful, idea of living in the moment. Infinity or not, the moment we have is undeniably here.
In my work with myself, my clients, and other relationships, I find that acceptance of what’s happening NOW is the most powerful and probably underutilized healing tool we have. Some people don’t like this and say, “I don’t want to accept the abuse of power from the government, my boss, or corporations. I don’t want to accept that I’m going to have to be the one to break generational cycles.” To this, I respond that accepance does not equal acceptable. What is happening in the present moment, is happening. This is less about judgment about the current moment, even if the judgment is justified, than it is about your relationship with it. After all, we are who we are through relationship with each other and the Earth. There is no hyperindividual way of being—even if you’re alone in a room, the air embraces you, change is always happening. I’m not one to regret much in life, but I wonder how I would have moved through the world differently if I realized how much it was moving with me.
Accepting what is happening now allows me to connect to my body. It allows me to know what beliefs are driving my actions. It gifts me self-compassion. It tells me to notice how ocean waves are not too different from myself. It helps me pause, knowing that in this pause, time can be a friend. It is a moment that has less breadth and more depth. I get to be congruent and hold many things at once: I can cry, I can laugh, I can grieve, I can resent someone, all at the same time. These actions aren’t sequential. They aren’t concerned with the past or the future. By acknowledging, accepting, and caring for what is happening within this moment, you’re able to do the next thing. It’s like being in the grocery store, checking out your items, and taking the grocery bags home with you. You don’t bag the items first before you pick them. You don’t leave the items before you go home. You attend to what’s happening in the moment.
Is healing an infinite quest? I don’t know if this is the wrong question, but it might be an unnecessary one. We are mortal beings who constantly change and experience change relative to the people, places, objects, systems, and power dynamic around us. There will be pain, there will be trauma, and there will be surprise. Our bodies always have mechanisms available for us to heal. That’s why we have blood. Tending to your wounds cannot be rushed. Wounds need the space-time continuuum to breathe, receive, and regenerate.
The Earth has gifted you healing. What will you do with it?
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