After a lot of thought lately I’ve come to realize that people are cyclical. I’ve always looked at life as a timeline. This is how we measure time. This is how we understand mathematics. We draw lines: positive and negative. Past, present, and future. This turns out to not work well for people and relationships.

People are cyclical. When looking at myself I’ve always wanted to improve. I constantly want to be better:  a better father, a better employee, a better person. I am not perfect though and as a result am constantly making and learning through my mistakes. But this is NOT a linear process. It is cyclical and here is the process: I decide to change, I work at it, I do better, I plateau, and then I fall back, hopefully not as far as the place I started but I do backpedal before picking up and moving forward again. This doesn’t just happen once. It happens over and over. We move through cycles of improvement or sometimes just cycles of round and round without improvement. The hope is that we don’t get stuck on one cycle that just repeats and repeats and repeats without making progress.

To avoid the negative cycles we need to be aware of them. The easiest and most detrimental place to be stuck in a negative cycle is in relationships with those whom we are closest with. Let’s look at a laundry example. My wife and I share a room and we’ve shared this room with our six kids as they’ve come along and gotten bigger. Currently we’re sharing it with our twin boys. Needless to say by the time we go to bed the lights are already out because there are always babies asleep in their cribs at that time. This tends to result in my clothes never quite making it to the hamper. They often are close but rarely are in. This ticks my wife off. She’ll blow up at me now and then, I’ll make an excuse, do a little better and then slack off giving myself the “lights are off” excuse. And the cycle repeats. This mild example can end up not being mild after a while. Resentment can build, tempers can flare, this thorn in my wife’s side could cause her to go off about something else that normally wouldn’t have bothered her. She could blow up at one of the kids because tripping over my clothes got her annoyed and then he cycle spreads and just because “the lights were out” one of the kids starts off the day on the wrong note. Not cool.

Breaking the cycle. Breaking cycles is one of the hardest things that we do as people. Addiction is so easy to fall into. The brain loves repetition and rhythm and familiarity. This is one reason people have a hard time ending relationships that are unhealthy; the familiarity is hard to let go of. I’m not sure I have a great strategy for breaking cycles. It is something that I am still working on, this cyclical construct is something that I’ve only recently been enlightened with.

They say that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results and I believe there is truth to that. I think that we as cyclical beings fall prey to our own cases of mild insanity more than we realize. We find ourselves in routines of familiarity and thought because we’re used to it. We frequent the same gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores and move in this grand circles. I will say that the people that I know who are most interesting and least burdened by depression are the ones who explore. Who venture to other gas stations. Who take weekend trips and vacations finding and exploring new places. Those who make it a goal to live beyond their cycles, beyond their repeating circles and repetitions are the ones who seem to discover a deeper meaning and measurable happiness and contentment.