Mental Timelines

When you picture your life, do have a timeline in your head? I do, but I’ve learned that some people don’t. During my three-year stint teaching sixth-grade Sunday school, I devoted considerable time drawing timelines on the chalkboard, attempting to place historical events in their proper context.  I had always thought that mental timelines were a natural part of people’s imaginations.  To me, being able to picture a timeline is an essential element to my being: it helps me visualize my own history in particular, but I can also visualize years prior to my existence.  If you say 1960 to me, I don’t have loads of information at my fingertips, but I immediately visualize Kennedy vs. Nixon, Psycho, The Apartment, and my parents’ first date.  Fast forward to, say, 1974, and I can tell you much more:

My first-grade class with Mrs. Davis at Marcy School
Nixon’s resignation
The Godfather Part II
The Conversation
Henry Aaron’s record-breaking home run
The third Oakland A’s Word Series victory in a row (over which team?  The Reds?  The Mets?)
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis
Relayer by Yes
Late for the Sky by Jackson Browne
Get Your Wings by Aerosmith
It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll by The Rolling Stones
Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan
Crime of the Century by Supertramp

I was only six years old in 1974, and while my timeline is unbalanced toward pop culture, I’m happy to have some sense of what was happening at the time.

Back when I drew timelines for my students, I would first try to anchor things in the context of seminal events.  For example, I’d ask them to approximate when the Civil War took place and I’d get a myriad of responses, most of them way off the mark.  I’d get an answer like the 1950s, and I’d say, “Okay, so I was born in 1968, and my parents were both born in the 1930s.  Do you think the Civil War took place just fifteen years before I was born and during my parents’ childhoods?”  They’d answer no, and gradually we’d come up with a better guess, if not entirely accurate. 

Not everyone may share the mental timeline that I can recall, though I imagine that many people could develop their own with some guidance.  When my children were young I purchased a large roll of blank white paper that I laid out on the floor and – after drawing a long line – marked the years of their family members’ birthdays, the years when movies they love were released, when various wars occurred, when the Packers Super Bowl victories took place, etc.  I hope this had some impact on their own understanding of their place in the world. 

But while I’ve always known on an intellectual level that people are different – that we all have strengths and weaknesses – it’s one thing to know this and quite another thing to stop yourself, apply the lesson and really consider others’ experiences.  I may have a decent mental timeline, but someone like the actress Marilu Henner has a condition called hyperthymesia that allows her to remember life experiences to in fine detail and with great accuracy.  According to Wikipedia, only around 60 people worldwide are thought to have this gift.  I would LOVE to have this condition, but I imagine that Marilu had to learn early on that not everyone has her ability to recall whether it was Mother’s Day in 1971 or in 1972 that temperatures plummeted and her family’s outdoor party needed to be brought indoors.  She would know this, and she may have as a young person wondered how her fellow family members could be so daft.

I would be lost without my mental timeline, just as Marilu Henner would be lost without her amazing gift, but other people have their own strengths and may wonder how others live without them.

And all this comes back to the lesson we’ve all learned multiple times but perhaps need reminding of from time to time: not to judge people, but to try to understand them.  I’ve come to learn that the people who don’t say hi to me on the street when I pass them maybe aren’t being rude, but may be absolutely terrified of social interaction.  They could also just be rude, but it does no good to assume so. Six years ago I wrote a comparison of the movies St. Vincent and The Fisher King, and concluded that “it doesn’t hurt to assume the best in people, and it could even do a lot of good.  And as contrived as this message may be, this is exactly the default setting we should be employing in our lives.”

I personally need to be reminded of this adage all the time. Fortunately, when it comes to remembering dates, I don’t need the same guidance.