Everything turns in a circle

Concepts for Conscious Living

The more one knows, the more one comprehends,
the more one realizes that everything turns in a circle.
Goethe

I suspect you've noticed by now that much of life seems to lead back to itself. In fact, as the quote from Goethe indicates, the beginning of wisdom is the ability to note this circularity.

Often, what brings people in for counselling is just the opposite of this sense of circularity. Clients come because life has finally become too full of seemingly unrelated trials and traumas. For most, life seems to be an endless series of obstacles, each unique and unconnected to what has gone before. Most marital difficulties, for example, are often described this way -- as a shopping list of disapproved of behaviours perpetrated by the spouse.

Such a linear approach to life happens because we choose to see each of the sticking points in our lives as being unrelated. For example, a client told me: "I never had a relationship with my father. He was emotionally unavailable, drank too much, and didn't value me. My ex-husband was emotionally unavailable and didn't value me. My last few relationships have been with men who were unenviable emotionally, or drank too much or didn't value me. I'm cursed to never have a good relationship with men."

She failed to notice the similarities, despite talking about it. She thought that, just because the men were different the situations was different too. The lesson was not that she would only have relationships with dysfunctional men. The lesson was that she had never worked out her relationship with her dad. She was therefore destined to repeat that relationship until she learned to resolve it. Circularity.

The events of our life follow patterns. Life is about remembering whom we are and what we've forgotten. The lessons we get help us remember. The lessons we need to learn repeat and repeat. All that changes are the details, the players. The base issue remains the same. Forever. Until we notice. And choose to do something different.

As soon as we notice how we are stuck, what our personal pattern is, we see that far from living a life where each problematic issue or relationship is different, we are actually caught repeating the same behaviour in different ways, with different people. When we notice that, we begin to see that we are actually revisiting the same issue over and over again. We begin to find wisdom when we realize that if we keep reacting to what we confront in the same way, we'll ALWAYS get the same results. We'll be caught, forever, in the same loop.

Is there a way out? But of course! The way out is to understand that life, when lived with wisdom, moves from a repeating circle to an upward spiral. Looking straight down, from the top, it still appears to be a circle. Around and around, confronting the same stuff, again and again.

From the side, we see the upward motion.

In practical terms, this means that, when we see our pattern coming around again, we can choose to do things differently. As soon as we do, the situation changes. We move through it, learn from it, take the lesson with us. We will then loop around, experiencing other things that challenge us. And we come back to the old issue, and it will rear its head again, but we will approach it differently. With grace. With understanding. And we will remember that to escape, we must actually change what we are doing.

If you will examine your life carefully, you will see your own repeating patterns. You will notice that, far from having a ton of issues, you have one or two played out in many situations. And your life will suddenly appear to be a circle, as opposed to an endless line of unrelated events.

From there, you can begin to look for alternative ways of being and seeing. As you find them, rather than just thinking about them, you can apply them in your life. The situation will then seem to change, but what has changed is YOU. And your life will appear to be a spiral. Around and around. Learning, adding, growing, transcending, including. And then you will see that there are infinite possibilities, and getting stuck is a choice.

And why, oh why, would we ever choose to be stuck?