Hey, thanks for stopping by. I suppose, as is tradition with starting a new blog, to do a kind of “welcome” post. Rather than go on about my story, I thought I’d jump right into today’s thought.
This has been a tremendous year of growth for me (it seems to happen every seven years or so) and throughout it I have been thinking about spirals.
Let me back up a bit. The truth of the matter is that a lot of us are pretty frustrated. Here in the Western World, life is technically the easiest and safest that it’s ever been. You wouldn’t know it to watch the news media or to talk to most people, though. While we generally are living great lives, I think there’s a sweeping sense of malaise that’s seeped into our overall culture.
Why?
There are all kinds of reasons, many beyond my knowledge and understanding, I’m sure. I’m not a sociologist, but I am someone who works with a lot of different people who come to me in pain, be it physical, emotional, spiritual, whatever, and I get them out of it. Here’s what I see:
I think that a lot of us have a pretty severe disconnect with our “natural selves” and that break is tough to reconcile. Call it our nature, our evolutionary biology, or what have you, but we’re built to operate in certain ways and many of us are are trying like hell to ignore that.
We are cyclical beings living in a cyclical world. There are seasons. There is a night and day. There are dry years and there are wet years.
We have good times and bad. We grow in spurts. We focus on our jobs for a while until our minds are drawn to wander. We listen to the same album over and over for days and then put it away for a while, nearly forgetting about it until we are delighted to “find it” and and revisit our enjoyment at a later date. Our alertness, hormones, and even our body temperature is cyclical.
We are cyclical beings but we, in our current society, are trying our damnedest to shoehorn ourselves into a linear life.
We keep our houses at a constant temperature. Our lights stay the same, usually with only “On” or “Off” settings. Most of us have constant access to food, shelter, and low-expenditure transportation. Many have a consistently low amount of activity. For those of us who do train (See? Exercise has to now be deliberate and considered “training”), if we’re not careful, we often find ourselves doing the same old sets and reps of the same old exercises.
We are cyclical beings but we, in our current society, are trying our damnedest to shoehorn ourselves into a linear life.
No wonder so many of us are struggling. We’re fighting out lifestyles upstream against the raging nature of existence.
Make no mistake: I’m not advocating a lifestyle of giving up our modern conveniences and glorifying a return back to Caveman or frontier days. This isn’t going to be be that type of blog. Our modern life has a lot of great benefits and you should be enjoying them.
So, what would happen if you gave all of that up and stopped trying to live linearly? Instead, what if you embraced the cycles?
The way I see it, you have three kinds of people moving through life:
Some people don’t really change at all, they just kind of float around and take what life gives them. These people are living like a cork, bobbing in the ocean. They can generally stay afloat but don’t usually end up anywhere meaningful. I call these people “Dots”, because they exist as a point or a random line.
Then there are those people who have a little intention in their life, so they are subject to the cycles of life but insist on marching forward as if it was linear. They never really grow or change. They just keep circling back around to the same ups and downs, slowly wearing down a path and groove, becoming more stuck in it with each turn of the wheel. They are living in Circles.
But what if you grew?
What if every cycle you expanded and became more capable? You would have bigger highs and you’d be more equipped to deal with the inevitable lows.
You would be moving in a Spiral. Consistently growing and expanding. Constantly moving your trajectory just a little bit each day but watching it build to tremendous improvement over time.
Don’t be a closed circle, retreading the same old, worn path. Grow into a spiral. All it takes is the same ambition you already have, a willingness to look a little outside of the established path, and a little courage when things get a bit rocky.
Welcome aboard!