I have a shape for humanity. In a sense, it's a single soul spiraling in an erratic pattern around a type of gravity well. Each time the soul goes into the well a life ends, each time it shoots back out a life begins. If looked at from a certain angle you could see that it's all one big line, but we don't have that perspective so we tend to think of all the lives happening at the same time. Some people's arc takes them far away from the well, others keep them close. A person you saw yesterday could be at the end of the line, a person you see tomorrow could be at the beginning. If you could unwind the entire line and mold it into a shape that would be understandable to our limited minds, you would find the most intricate and beautiful story that we could never imagine. I see it more clearly than I can speak it, but I'll keep trying.
Sounds kinda like grooves in a record. Very interesting. It reminded me of something I recently read, may've been here on Hubski, or links found via Hubski. That some basic building block of existence... photon? Gods, I can't remember. Anyhow, it travels faster than the speed of light, so in essence, it transcends time. All of time can be found in a single instance of that element, and at any given point in human time, it is existing in both earth's prehistorical periods and periods far into the future all at once.
Not so orderly as grooves on a record. Have you ever scribbled with a pen for a long time, making loop upon loop that all cross over a central point? Some loops are huge, others small, all eventually make their way back to the dark inky blotch in the middle. Something like that.
Sadly I don't remember much about them, but the Wikipedia article on attractors is actually pretty nice. Seems like attractors are just some set of numbers for which a system tends toward. Maybe the fixed-point attractor is a better descriptor of your original idea: the system tends toward one fixed point and oscillates around it chaotically. I first read about attractors in high school in the book Chaos by James Gleick, which is a fantastic book I highly recommend for this sort of stuff.