Tell me something. Are you wiser, once you’re older? I am twenty-six and I don’t feel wiser than I did at eighteen, and that seems wrong. One could accurately suggest that life has taken me in didactic circles, round and round, showing me something and then bringing me right back to it once I’ve forgotten what was taught. You learn to love, then get your heart broken, which teaches you to toughen up and put up your walls, until one day when you let down those walls and let yourself hope again, and then the cycle starts all over. Or you exercise everyday for a month, then miss a few days, then miss a month, then six months, then realize it’s time to renew your gym membership and start the chain of events all over again. Or you get motivated, you pick a goal and shoot headlong for it, blocking out everything else, but then someone or something catches your eye, you get distracted, and the one thing you set out to do falls by the wayside until you finally return to it, wipe the dust off, and try again. Or maybe it is a different cycle for you, but undoubtedly, there is a cycle. It seems to me that there should be a way out of the maze. An ultimate combination move that if you could just get the sequence down, you could move on to the next level.
Unfortunately, at twenty-six, I am no closer to figuring that move out than I was a decade ago. If we are constantly following a 360 degree path, then what is it that we are orbiting around? What is it that has such a pull on us that we cannot get more than a certain distance away from it before going back? Is the key to free yourself from these desires, or is it to submit to them, or is the point to learn to give them up, or what? Myself, I think this gravitational pull that we cannot seem to escape is what the religions of the world are trying to address. That what you are seeking in each instance listed above is love, acceptance, and purpose, which is what religion tries to provide. And despite the skeptical tone in those last two sentences, I do think that makes a certain amount of sense. What I have yet to see is someone who has stopped circling, and that makes me wonder if it is possible. What if the purpose of each person is to simply wander in a slowly shrinking circle, again and again, in the hopes that after a lifetime of circling, they may have actually learned something true?
I guess everything in nature is a cycle, and it would be foolish of me to think that life would be exempt from that pattern. But still, sometimes I wish I could stop circling and just be there already.
