Cyclical is a pattern into which many lives seem to fall: we desire something, proclaim the desire, strive for the thing, and later--acquiring it or not--look back and laugh about the whole process. Than we sincerely desire something else, and the cycle begins again. The it changes, but the cycle is the same.
Now in one life there are many of these cycles, but what of the elusive, distant happiness? Or the yet-more-elusive success? We imagine those to be fixed ideas awaiting discovery, special and (I despise this word) unique to each of us. Mmm, how warm and fuzzy and useless!
"But oh, Chris you miss the point!" a hypothetical friend recently argued, with the best of intentions. "Happiness and success are a journey and not a destination, something to be dreamt in the past, enjoyed in the present, and and only fully observed and reflected upon in a future we know will someday come."
Agh! So what is your path then? How is your journey? I quibble. "Well, I'm just waiting to see where life takes me and enjoying the ride in the meantime."
Lovely, so it is in fact taking you somewhere?
In this beautiful outlook, my friend finds pleasant assurance in the steady march of time, that surely there is some path he is on that fate mysteriously yet persistently lays out for him. "Oh, rats!" he might muse. "I have been here before! Woe is me for making the same mistake and leading myself in cyclical circles! Ha! I will now laugh at the indiscretions of my youth, or high school years, or college party years, or aimless wandering of Europe years, or sulking, boring job years, and look to the horizon that I have pinpointed for sure this time."
Really? So this supposed path is actually just walking around in circles, and every once in a while you experience an epiphany just like the last one: "Oh! Now I know where I am. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is the right way."
Sounds like being lost in the woods to me. "No!" he says, "the path is one of self-discovery. It is there for you to find, like a deep, spiritual game of trial and error, leading to a gradual gaining of wisdom that comes naturally with age."
So as long as we all buy into the rules and object of the game, why question it's utility to finding fulfillment in life? No one ever dictated this as a fruitful way of life, only echoed it. Truly, there is no single being that has created this thought system; no one owns the idea, but everyone has adopted it. Why?
"There is surely no other way!" you might contend. Yass, yass, that is the point. How can a fish in one lake imagine life in another? And so we go on thinking with assumptions we see exclusively as life truths. How does one become aware of the cultural constructs in which one swims? Asking the fish around me is yet another cycle that leads back to the start. Even if you get Boardwalk and Park Place, you still have to go around again. In fact, you never stop going around. You don't get to stop until you lose everything or everyone else loses everything before you. So success is Boardwalk and Park Place?
"No, it's not a competition. This is about what you want from life!" you might proclaim.
"You don't have to play by other people's rules! Find the freedom to be yourself!"
Hmm, do you mean just be myself, or be myself and also find a way to explain who I am to you?
-5/8/12
Update:
I am still in the lake. And still whining about it. But I haven't made a board game analogy in weeks.
-6/30/12
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