Progress is Like Encircling a Mountain: Familiar Views, New Perspectives

Let’s remember that we’re cyclical beings. We cycle and recycle through different states and stages, ripe with emotions, sensations, thoughts, relationships, and opinions. We roam through our lives believing to be walking a path, progressing in a linear way on a single plane. The thing is, the path is more of a spiral heading upwards, like a trail that encircles a mountain. As we get nearer to the top, we can begin to notice that we turn the corner more easily and more quickly. This is because we’ve moved through that route already. We’ve seen that view before. Only now we’re farther up. Our vantage point has shifted. We can see from a zoomed out view, one that encompasses a wider perspective and offers us a broader context for our unique view of it all. We’ve transcended upwards.

So when we’re flowing through our routes, we can try to remember this nature of cycles: this feeling of a spiral that goes upward, one that allows us to tread through familiar landscapes while remaining in our pursuit of growth or development. At the core of these concepts of self-care and bettering ourselves, lies the value of somehow progressing in a quest for improvement. Alongside that, we have to remember that what we’ve come from comprises what we are now. Our pasts are not behind us but rather a part of us, informing how we orient in our present. When the ground gets shaky, it can be helpful to acknowledge that we’re in fact spiraling our way upwards as ever-unfolding cycles of being. And what’s a mountain trail if not rocky?

On the drums, we sometimes we feel we've already been through it all. We wonder if we can discover a new rhythm or if we'll plateau right where we've been for a while. With time, we realize we can more easily find that new rhythm we long for because we're no longer at the base of the mountain. We've made it through the widest circle and we have way less ground to traverse to turn that corner into something new. And that magic moment emerges much more seamlessly.