Time loops

They are out there. Daily, sometimes hourly reminders of how easy it is to get stuck inside moments. Old ones, that is. Previous pieces of the past that may feel fresh but are actually quite stale. Small bits of yesterday, last year, last decade, maybe even last lifetimes that replay without rewinding, that return without invitation or practice, snippets of experience that masquerade as something new, as scraps of today, as slices of now that are really not now at all. They are dead pieces of before. They should remain dead pieces of before. Yet they seem very much alive in the present. Perhaps because we treat them as if they are unexpected, welcome them as if we are surprised.

Time loops. Cycles of feeling, of emotion, of thought that repeat themselves. Over. And over. And over in our lives.

I called them reminders but that is not how I necessarily experience them. It takes recognition to stir awareness of repetition. And awareness is vital to the cognitive experience of distinction. Of separation. I cannot become observer of my mental and emotional patterns until I permit myself space to simply acknowledge what I am feeling, how I am thinking. With acknowledgement, however, comes opportunity for pause. For reflection.

For change.

As much as I dislike admitting it, my days are checkered with a fair share of time loops. This past week, I attended a medical conference that should have felt fresh, different: it was centered on the wellbeing of physicians and everyone was required to be vaccinated and to wear masks. That is a scenario not previously part of my past experience! And yet, sitting in a large ballroom of a grand hotel, chairs separating participants by three feet, my own mask pinching at the bridge of my nose, my mind intermittently played its time loop games, vaulting me into feeling states from decades before, those feeling states associating me yesterday and today with the spaces and places I have traversed decades earlier in my training and career. It was as if certain parts of my past, huddled quietly into the recesses of my consciousness, felt compelled to receive recognition. They wanted me to tell colleagues some stories of my training. They urged me to talk more than to listen. They wanted to have their moment of acknowledgment.

Or it may have been closure. But how often do we talk of things that are remembrances of times past only to have those remembrances make unwarranted claims on how we feel and act today, who we are in this moment, and what we should be in the next? Telling a story from forty years before does not ensure it will reach its conclusion. A desire for a postscript, an edited contemporary version of that story, loiters, lingers, and sometimes lurks in the shadows of ego, of subconscious, or whatever word best describes that lagoon of past life that is me, that was me, that should be released from me, that behaves as if it has some claim on me today.

These are not necessarily traumatic events. They are not even momentous events. Just slivers of experience that, once etched into the compressed sediment of my personal evolution, are poised to shine in the light of remembrance should I only point its beam in their direction.

“When I was a surgical intern,” I heard myself say, “I was once assisting in a cardiac bypass with one of the leading cardiac surgeons at the time. There was a crowded team of surgeons in sterile garb around the patient’s open chest.

‘Hold this’, the prominent surgeon said to me. In my gloved left hand he placed a silk suture that was helping gently lift something inside the patient’s chest, something of which I had no view. I was told to stand behind the lead surgeon, to reach around his left side, to keep the right amount of tension on the suture and not break sterile technique. Meaning that my front could in no way touch his side or back.

Was I doing anything useful or was this some test?

‘Keep up that tension’, I heard. ‘And stay awake.’

I’m not very tall. And my arms aren’t very long. Yet somehow I managed to hold something I couldn’t see, to do this for who knows how long, to stare at the surgeon’s left shoulder blade without touching it. And not fall asleep. To this day, I don’t know if I was doing anything useful. How could I? Except someone later told me that I was. Only the sterile fingers of my left hand were needed. And my hand was smaller than others. So many hand was the one balanced in mid-air at the brink of a man’s open chest. The rest of me wasn’t needed. Just my fingertips.”

This happened in 1985. And yet here I was, telling the story many years later, a story I had thought forgotten, a memory I had long since filed (or so I thought) into the shred or discard bin of my life.

Yet when I mimicked the position of my arm and hand, curled carefully around the side of a friend at the conference, I could have easily been there, then, in the operating room of 1985. I could even be there now as a type these words.

But I am not. I cannot be. I must release the feeling of the cramped fingers, hand, and arm, the smell of the room, the sounds of those in it, the thoughts that ran through the wiring of what we call mind and let them all belong to then, to before, to the collective archives of time and our human subscription to it.

So I flex the fingers of my left hand, take a long breath, appreciate the perspective out the window of the bedroom where I sit, and I am thankful for the opportunity to snip that loop from the shaggy wig of life that likes to hide today from yesterday, the tangle of time that also veils the view of forward, of future, of what may be if I just let it. And I smile at the image of the past resignedly sweeping that snip along with others from the floor beneath and behind me. I hear yesterday sigh as it gathers the curls of released time loops in its cosmic dustpan and disposes of them in ways I do not need to know or imagine. And I purposefully press new loops of potential into the film canister of tomorrow.

I smile at the great fortune I have to be part of something yet to be.