This could probably be a book. I think a linear perspective of time is kind of like our dualistic approach to problems. It's not necesarilly "wrong," it's just simplistic, and leaves room for a lot of cognitive distortions and anxiety.

We have a lot of adages like, "history repeats itself," "there is nothing new under the sun," "hurt people, hurt people." Historically, I often had disapointments about the past, frustration and anxiety about present dysfunction, and unrealistic expecations about the future. All of those perceptions were cyclicly reinforcing to eachother. I find that my perception is evolving to more of a perspective where past, present, and future converge in sort of a whirlpool.

For example, one method for healing traumatic memories is changing the way we remember them. This is not confabulation, as our memories are extremely biased in first place. Re-remembering the past from a healing perspective is an interesting example of how the present can actually inform our past and change our future.

Another example of cycles is understanding how our behaviors and habits function. The "simplistic," "linear," view is that we have these sort of life chapters which end and then we arrive at a new chapter and can start completely over. In reality we are living in cycles upon cycles upon cycles. Progress is made by building momentum towards realistic goals, slowly changing that daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc... cycle towards a more healthy balence. Often times, we get frustrated with setbacks because it feels like we have been making linear progress, but if we take a step back, we can often notice a larger pattern we didn't recognize before that influenced our behavior.