Flint and Steel Full Circle Writing Challenge

Circles of Change

Doesn’t everything come around as a full circle?

Circles. I remember drawing them as a child. My hands wouldn’t stay steady enough to draw a neat clean circle. I used to laugh at the wavy, curvy, up-and-down shape that ended up scribbled on paper.

Now, decades later, I think about it and realize it’s more than just geometry. It’s life. Life is often thought of as a line (maybe that’s the origin of the word ‘lifeline’?), progressing from one end of the graph to the other. But does life really follow the straight linear path that we’d like it to?

Full Circles

And when you add the concept of a full circle — the act of coming around to where we were earlier and having to restart/resume things — it becomes even harder to reconcile reality with fantasy.

Personally, part of the reason I sometimes don’t like coming around full circle is because it involves something fundamental and unavoidable: change. It requires us to move from point A to point B, all the way to Z. Our human minds like change as long as all twenty-six letters are joyous, beautiful, happy and predictable.

We wouldn’t mind doing the full circle if every letter was a pleasant rest stop. Relocating back to a place you used to live in before, reuniting with friends/family after years of being apart, restarting a great job that you used to work at years ago — those are full circles that are happily embraced.

But when change happens from a place of relative happiness, to one of discomfort — when B is nice and warm, and C is cold and wet — we’re unhappy and resist it. Working on a project for months, only to realize that you were on the wrong trajectory and having to restart it all; finding yourself in the same unhappy state of mind you were in months ago and feeling unsure about what to try next — those are full circles that encounter a lot of resistance.

Doesn’t everything come around?

The other part about full circles is we end up feeling like we’re back to square 1, to letter A. All that journeying around twenty-six rest stops and here we are again, right where we started. What was the point of it if we were to end up at the same place?

In moments like these, I have to pause and ask myself: am I really where I was X months/years/decades ago? Am I even the same person I was a breath ago? The answer to both is ‘no’. So how can I say that ‘I’ am at the same place as before? ‘I’ am not the person I was earlier, and neither is the rest stop — environments change, beings living in it change, seasons change.

Sometimes things might not come around in a perfect full circle. It may be a triangle with rounded corners and curvy lines — life takes whatever path it needs to. We have control over some aspects of it, but not all. Yet, things always come around. Can we think of one aspect of life — all life on earth, not just human — where things don’t come around to where they started?

• The earth rotates around its axis every day and does a full circle. How would things be if it didn’t do that? ‘Time’ would be frozen, as would life.
• The earth revolves around the sun and makes a full circle every year. The sun is a part of the solar system which revolves around the Milky Way galaxy, doing its full circle in two-hundred million years. What would happen if the earth stopped revolving and was stuck in one place? How would it be to have one season persist across the entire earth forever? Would life even be possible for all species that currently exist?
• Would your computer stay on forever, or will you need to reboot it at some point?
• Do stocks stay at the same price or do they move up and down, revisiting the same price multiple times?
• Leaves of deciduous trees dance their way along their circle of life, from the earth to the tree and back to the earth.
• The breath that we take in does a circle from the air outside, to our lungs and back outside again.
• I was in India last month, helping take care of my father, who’s has had Alzheimer’s for fifteen years and just recently got covid, followed by pneumonia. For two months he’s been on a liquid diet, where all his food is fed through a tube that goes into his nose. I held a tube of liquid and squeezed the food into his body. It sort of reminded me of how he used to take care of the infant me, forty years ago, patiently hand-feeding me every bite of food. I don’t have the same patience he did, but in a way, it is a full circle.
• I was in a relationship for sixteen years and got divorced. Now I find myself, relationship-wise, at the same place I was earlier: single. It wasn’t always a pretty circle, but I can’t deny that it was indeed a full circle.

Embrace or Resist

So, what’s coming in the way of not embracing being back at rest stop A and having to redo things?

Is it the fear of uncertainty? Is it lack of faith in our ability to learn from challenges and come out wiser and stronger? Is it frustration and feeling like we’ve been treated unfairly? Depending on our individual situation, our answer (or our questions) might vary, but there’s value in asking that question, in delving deeper to find out the root cause of that resistance.

This writing prompt made me realize that we have two choices when we find ourselves at the same point we were earlier: either accept the reality that all things change and restart, or resist it.

We can choose to sit at the starting point, harboring anger and frustration, refusing to move ahead, or we can choose to restart, taking with us the learnings from our last round and using them to do a better circle this time.

The choice is ours.

This was written as part of the Flint & Steel Full Circle Writing Prompt. Thanks Ellie Jacobson for initiating it.

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