There’s so much ahead of us… literally!
I often find myself commenting on time, probably because it never stops astonishing me. It flows and stretches and sometimes rushes past so quickly that it seems to rewrite its own rules.
Five minutes in a bank lineup can feel like an eternity, while an evening spent laughing with friends seems to vanish in the blink of an eye. Time is a trickster that keeps us guessing about what is real and what is remembered.
But here’s something you might not know.
Our brains actually use an internal code to keep track of time. Without that code, which has many common features in all human beings, we would have no sense of when anything happened.
Our first day of kindergarten would feel as recent as this morning’s breakfast or last week’s dental appointment. Every event would sit in the same moment, with no separation at all.
That is because we do not just measure time. We map it. We assign moments to the space around us in a way that gives structure and direction to our lives.
Think about it for a moment.
Point to the past. Where is it for you? Most people sense it somewhere behind them or perhaps off to the left.
Now point to the future. Is it out in front, like a ship slowly approaching shore? Or do you feel it off to your right, waiting like the next page in a book you have not yet turned?
And where is the present? Is it where you are sitting or standing? Or do you feel it just ahead of you, hovering in that thin slice between what has already happened and what is yet to come?
When you imagine all three together, past, present, and future, can you sense that they line up in a kind of invisible highway through space?
These are not idle questions. They reveal something profound about how we live.
In the world of NLP, this internal representation of time is called a Timeline.
Your Timeline is unique to you. It shapes the way you experience your memories, your plans, and your entire sense of who you are.
For instance, someone who places their past directly in front of them may find themselves constantly reliving old experiences. I once knew a woman who had survived a serious car accident with her family. Two years later, she still spoke about it as though it had just happened yesterday. For her, the past was always right in front of her eyes.
When I helped her move that past behind her, something remarkable occurred. The memory faded into proper perspective. The accident became something that had happened long ago, and the emotional intensity drained away.
The same idea can help with people who feel overwhelmed by their schedule. When their future is too close and events seem to pile up, we can expand the space between those future moments. The person immediately feels lighter and more at ease, as though the pressure has melted away.
And within those Timelines sit countless individual events. Some belong to the past, while others are the imagined experiences of a future that has not yet arrived.
When I was working as a therapist thirty years ago, I used Timelines all the time, and I was endlessly amazed at the creativity of the human mind.
One woman saw her past as a string of little snow globes, each one glowing with a tiny scene that came alive whenever she focused on it.
Another person saw full-colour slides that appeared in sequence, while others experienced short moving films of important moments in their lives.
The key question is not just how someone represents time. The real question is whether that way of coding time is actually helping them live well.
If it’s not, it can be changed.
A person can realign their Timeline to create more peace, more energy, and a more empowering future.
Years ago, my sister came to me with a fear of heights. She wanted to take a hot air balloon ride in Arizona, where she lives part of the year. When we explored her Timeline, we discovered that the fear began during a family trip to Wales when she was about four years old.
She saw herself standing beside our father at a place called Huntsman’s Leap, looking down into a deep chasm. My father was reading a plaque to her, about a man on horseback who was chasing a fox, and died of a heart attack when he saw the terrifying gap his horse had leapt across.
As that memory came into conscious awareness, the fear vanished instantly and never returned.
Timelines can be used in many ways. They can help recover forgotten memories, release the emotional charge of trauma, and even reshape the future by adding motivation and new choices for what comes next.
So I will leave you with a question.
Where are your past, your present, and your future located?
- Mike Mandel
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