Life is not linear: Growing in circles
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 14/11/2019

I've been feeling a little bit less motivation over the past few days, a bit of a time of transition as I have to adjust to a new way of thinking. 
One thing that I realized today is that something about how I was thinking was- it was too much like here's this goal that I want to get to, and here's this future state that I want to achieve. 
But then really, what's the point? I mean, we live- what what's the point to live our lives hoping to achieve a future state, but then eventually we just die. 
So really, looking- life cannot be treated as a race with a finish line, or shooting at a goal, because the goal is simply the end. 
Now, we could say that the goal is to live a good life, the goal is to live a meaningful life. 
And yet that's not a goal that we can ever say is achieved, until the end. 
That's something that would be renewing, and it's something that we have to do continuously, until we eventually are not living anymore. 
So I realized that the way I was thinking about my self-development and my work was- it had become too linear, too focused on shooting forward into the future, towards a goal. 
And ultimately, if we take that too far, it is ultimately meaningless, because there is no end, and when we get to the end, we are simply done. 
So it left me wondering, you know, what's the point? But now, as I see it, really it's better to think of self-development as moving in circles, or perhaps spirals, we could say. 
Rather than shooting forward like an arrow in a straight line towards a target, we move a step towards a target, and then we wake up- then we find ourselves in a new state. 
So it's not this full trajectory of, you know, climbing the staircase towards this goal in the sky, climbing the mountain, although that's one way to look at it, but it's not the full picture. 
There's no final top of the staircase. 
There's no top of the mountain. 
And if we focus on that as the goal, what's the point? If we say, okay, well, there is no top of the staircase, no top of the mountain, then the goal is to get as high up on the staircase, as high up on the mountain as possible. 
But then still, that doesn't really capture life, because then, okay, we're just trying to get as good as possible by the time we die. 
It still is trying to shoot for this end point, an end point which would just be the end of life. 
So instead, it's like we can look at little goals that way. 
Every little goal is like a mountain, or a staircase. 
We move up towards- we take certain small steps in a certain direction, we make a certain achievement. 
Then we find ourselves at the top of that mountain, the top of that staircase. 
And then now we're in a new place, and then we now have new goals. 
There's a new mountain. 
In essence, for every time we climb a staircase, we find ourselves at the bottom of a new staircase, or at the foot of a new mountain. 
It may be hard to picture that as a real mountain, that every time you get to the top, you're actually at the bottom of another mountain. 
But in a sense, it is like that. 
So that when we achieve something, we become a new person, we change ourselves as a person, and we then find ourselves in a state where we can then move on to take the next step in our development. 
So that's what makes it like a cycle or a circle, because every time you finish, every time you achieve something, you get to the end of that phase, but then you're at the beginning of the new phase of achievement. 
You achieve the next thing, and then you find yourself at the beginning of a new phase. 
So every time you make it to the top of something, then you're at the bottom and the beginning of something else. 
And it can be looked at as spirals, because even though it's going in a circle, each time you could say it's getting higher and higher, even as it goes in these circles. 
I think something that's really exciting about this way of looking at it is that we cannot even see the full picture. 
It's not like each little step, each little achievement, is a measurable step along the way towards an ultimate goal. 
We make the first step, we achieve something, but then we are in a state where we don't even know what the next step is. 
We are at the foot of a new mountain that we can't even see now. 
What we see as the objective now, when we make that first step, that first achievement, were then in a new place, a new person, so that the next achievement, the next mountain would be something that we could never have predicted. 
So this journey of self-development is not moving towards some kind of path we can understand. 
It's making these changes as we go, but then as we go, we discover new things that we could not even imagine. 
So what it means to have this, to be on this path, by the time we're a few steps further down the path, we will be somewhere that we never could have predicted or even imagined. 
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