"Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?"
"I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning."
- J.K Rowling
It’s a warm night in July, and I’m sitting here wondering where half the year went.
All right, that’s not true. I know exactly where it went. These past few months have been caught up in a swirl of new responsibilities at work, family issues, depression and anxiety and too many video games.
Last year was about change for the better. My mother was going through chemotherapy, and it was going well. I was quitting my addictions, embracing my goals, improving myself as a person. I felt like I was moving forwards.
This year my mother’s cancer is coming back, and it’s officially stage four. I don’t feel that different anymore. It all seems like more of the same. Too easily I find myself slipping back into old patterns of behaviour, procrastination and avoidance of painful emotions. This is where the true challenge lies. What do you do when you start sliding downwards? Hope is easy in the beginning, but how do you sustain it?
Today I’m talking about circles.
Someone I know from work died the other day. I knew him for years. We saw each other around most days, made small talk, arrived and left together. The same patterns playing out until you could almost believe they’d last forever. Until they don’t. One day the cycle stopped.
We all have to face death sooner or later. Just like in The Lion King, Simba in the gorge trying to comprehend that his father was never coming back, we too are forced to recognize that the circle of life embraces us all. A circle has neither beginning nor end, but it does end for everyone. Someday it will end for us.
This is natural. Everything ends. Careers, relationships, journeys. Dreams. We get sick of the work we’re doing; we drift apart from the people we’ve loved; we take the final step of the adventure. We lose sight of our dreams. They get buried under clouds of anxiety, mountains of responsibility, the darkness of depression. They get worn down by the constant grinding of routine. And so we fall back into the same patterns as before. The same fantasies that make us feel better. Because we haven’t really changed, have we? We still have the same feelings, the same flaws. We’re still the same people in the end.
But what does it mean to change?
Mark Manson once said that it’s impossible to change yourself, and a waste of time to try. I love the guy, but when I read that last year, I was sure he was mistaken. I was a better person. I had changed myself.
Later I realized that he was right. I hadn’t changed who I was. I was simply doing different things and feeling better for doing them; getting high on my own self-improvement. Then I stopped feeling better and backslid into bad habits, until I could feel good about quitting them again. So the cycle goes.
That’s all it comes down to in the end: our behaviour. The self is an amorphous concept made up of race, religion, upbringing, emotion, mistakes we’ve made and lessons learned, the people we hate and those we love. Our identity is the sum of our entire lives, every choice we’ve ever made, distilled into who we are today. How are you going to change that?
The answer is, of course, you can’t. I understand that now. You will always be yourself. You can only make better choices, take better actions. The choice to consume less sugar. The choice to put the damn phone away and read a book instead. The choice to actually sit down and write all this out instead of telling yourself you’ll do it tomorrow.
I wanted to find some new insight here. But a lot of this is stuff I’ve said before. I don’t know how to stay hopeful, any more than I know how to predict the future. All I can do is what we’re all doing, one day at a time: stepping blindly into the unknown. Perhaps this is bravery? I don’t feel particularly brave.
We’re always moving forwards, whether we want to or not. There are things I take for granted now that seemed impossibly distant when I was younger. I’m sure that years from now, I’ll look back and feel the same about the problems of today, no matter how overwhelming they may seem.
The circle of life is always turning. We can accept that there are things we cannot change, but take control of what we can. Or we can deny them all, forever drifting through patterns of avoidance, complacency and distraction, until the day the cycle stops. Here’s the thing about circles: every ending is also a beginning. Every death is the start of a new phase of life. Loss is unavoidable, but the circle moves forwards nonetheless.
I guess all we can do is make the most of the time we have left.
