Circles or Spirals?

Image: thenounproject.com

A lot of people seem to think about life in terms of circles. “What goes around comes around,” for instance, is a fairly common phrase.

Based on my experience, though, and the details of my life I sort of relentlessly try to track, I’m more inclined to think about life in terms of spirals.

For instance, let’s say we experience something uncomfortable, perhaps a form of harassment at our workplace, and we deal with it by feeling ashamed, hiding ourselves away in our cubicle, and trying to make ourselves invisible.

Then, ten years later, you suddenly encounter a situation that’s nearly a carbon copy of that first situation.

Another Pass on the Hamster Wheel?

Some people would perceive this as circular: we believe we’re being subjected to the same situation because we didn’t get it right the first time. Can you hear and feel the judgment and self-criticism in this approach? I hear it; and I’ve felt it, too.

And I’ve learned that I don’t want to look at the situation that way. I prefer to see it as an opportunity to put into action the skills I’ve cultivated and the understandings about myself and life and just people in general that I’ve learned over the past ten years.

So after working at two other companies and seeing, experiencing, and learning about all sorts of other situations, observing how others handled those issues, and recognizing that what you’d experienced ten years earlier was not, in fact your ‘fault’ simply because you are a particular gender, you have a remarkably similar experience to the one ten years ago. And you respond in a completely different manner. In fact, you respond in a way you would never have dreamed you’d respond ten years ago.

Awareness of the Spiral

If I’m able to remain aware enough in my life to recognize a pattern coming back to me on my spiral, I feel challenged and maybe even a little bit eager to see how I’ve hopefully raised my awareness and cultivated my personal power enough to meet the situation from a place of grace or at least compassion and understanding of myself and others.

As I write this, especially when I read that last sentence, above, I realize I may be sounding way more lofty and a lot more pompous than I feel.

Trust me when I say that I aspire to greet certain situations that are ‘returning to me on the spiral’ with more grace, understanding, and compassion – but that doesn’t mean I succeed.

Closed Circuits of Circular Experience

And yet…I am never, ever the same person who experienced a situation one moment and then a remarkably similar one some time later (or had an encounter with the same person pushing our buttons, for instance). We are never the same from one moment to another – so it is almost impossible to be stuck in a closed circuit of circular experience.

Even though it is nearly impossible for us to be stuck in a ‘closed circuit of circular experience,’ we can choose to look at our repeated experiences as bad luck. Or we can develop a belief system that tells us that everybody is out to screw us. In essence, we can choose not to change or learn.

I recently realized that Karl and I are currently dealing with a number of life experiences that have eerily similar hallmarks of many situations we encountered thirty years ago. We’re flirting with feelings, looking at opportunities, and responding to challenges that are astonishingly similar to those we dealt with thirty years ago.

Every Day We Get to Choose

Did we learn anything from how we walked through those experiences three decades ago? Have we shifted, evolved, regressed, closed down, or expanded our awareness since then?

Each day – sometimes from one moment to the next – we get to choose. Are we on a hamster wheel? Or are we ascending a spiral that teaches us new aspects about ourselves and who we are, that gives us an opportunity to transform our lives by responding differently to similar situations or applying concepts we’ve embraced in the interim?