Taking The Spin Out Of The Cycle
Every once in a while you may find yourself getting bored with the same old routine. The routine becomes so mundane that your head ends up spinning as you feel like your life is just going around in circles doing the same things over and over again! This can be particularly true if you end up doing a 9-5 everyday, 5 days a week! The only break to the cycle is the weekend and even then most of the weekend is spent worrying about the fact that Monday will come around again shortly! You spend the whole week looking forward to the weekend and then it comes and you and it becomes wasted away in a dreary cycle of trying to recouperate from the gloom of the past week, then it hits Sunday evening, and panic sets in!
LIFE IS CYCLIC! There is no escaping this simple fact. We will forever be in a cycle because that’s what we’ve chosen, as I believe, to experience human existence! The Sun rises and sets. You breathe, awake, eat and sleep in cyclic fashion. The seasons rotate, after winter, must come spring. We reproduce, we’re born, we die, we’re happy, we’re sad. The list of cycles of life goes on and on. It’s quite easy to succumb to these cycles and feel like we were not meant for great things – it’s just a simple question of surviving! But maybe it’s not so much a case of what we’re meant to do, as opposed to what we’re capable of doing! I believe that even through all these continous eternal cycles of life, we have the ability to take our understanding of it to the next level. Yes the repetition can sometimes cause your brain to melt of boredom but the trick is seeing the cycle in a whole new light, a way that never even fathomed!
The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes – Proust
That saying by Proust is more true than you’ll ever realise! Being in the same position over and over again is a natural part of life, experiencing it differently each time however, is not! It’s not nature, it’s creative! It’s the part of us the unleashes the creative genius within us all! This is where children have this skill down to a tee! They can play the same game over and over but what they tend to do is create new stories or characters or imaginery situations to go along with the real ones. They have mastered how to take the mundane and turn it into something exciting and fun!
It’s natural to feel boredom from doing the same job over and over again! But since when did nature intend us to feel bored when she’s offered us so much variety! The trouble with working in an office for example is that often it doesn’t allow for much creativity! You may end up looking out of the same window, day in, day out! The same people, the same situations, the same scenario’s etc. It just doesn’t give much scope for changing the way you feel because you’re seeing and doing the same things every day!
I remember I used to work on the 11th floor of a 21 story building. On the 21st floor there is a large restaurant and you can see for miles from that point. I don’t go to that building as often as I used to, but whenever I do, because I don’t see it often, I really get to appreciate the views from being that high up! There are no other tall buildings around it and on a clear day you get to see pretty much most of London.
That’s an example of how you can appreciate something you don’t see so often but how can you appreciate, something you see everyday, in a new way? How can you appreciate the people around you that you see all the time? How do you renew your feelings of excitement and anticipation? It’s quite simple really, YOU RENEW YOU! Ok, let me repeat that, YOU RENEW YOU!
“Ok Amit you’ve finally lost it and need to be put into a crazy house” I hear you say! 😆 Yes, yes, put me in a crazy house!
Think back to how you felt when you first picked up your mobile phone and made your first phone call. How did you feel? Wasn’t it exciting to know that you could be contacted and make calls while on the move? Wasn’t it amazing at the time that we first had the technology to do that? Or think back to the first time you enjoyed the experience of sending a email! I remember that these things to me were almost orgasmic! 😆 I love technology and gadgets and when I got my first mobile phone and my first laptop I was like a kid with new toys! Remember those moments when these things were new and exciting. What’s changed since then? Nothing except that the technology is like a 1000 times more powerful! We just got used to it all and now it’s a daily occurence. We’ve forgotten how to appreciate what this technology does for us.
Think about this: When you push a key on a keyboard, lets say, the letter “K”, You see a bit lettering on a piece of plastic. Now you push that button, and electrical signal is passed from that button through a circuit board, down some copper wire, through another super circuit board, though a super proccesor which is nothing more than a bunch of tansistors etched onto a silicon die which then sends those messages to a piece of software which then translates this signal into the letter “K” in your word processor. It does all this almost instantaneously! You don’t even notice all this going on, you take for granted that this amazing world is working in the background and all these intricate processes are going on in order that you can send messages to people in a coherent language form that we can all understand! HOW AMAZING IS THAT! I have to admit I forget this sometimes but then I remind myself of all the amazing bizarre stuff going on in the background in this quantum world that we never get to see! Most of this technology has come about in the last 10 – 20 years. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do in another 20 years!?!
There are an unlimited ways you can change the way you look at things. Just think about this, as you’ve been sitting here reading this, you’ve shed skin and grown new skin in it’s place. Unconsciously your body parts are renewing themselves and you don’t even realise it! You’re brain is doing way way way more than a computer could ever do and it does it with minimal of effort! You don’t even need to be plugged into a wall socket! 😛
It will forever come down to the way you choose to renew your vision of life and the great cycle we’ve chosen. To me these mysteries will always provide me hours of fascination that takes the boredom away and lets me be a part of this amazing quantum world that forever works its magic while we enjoy the benefits. Remember to always appreciate the glorious microscopic wonderful events that are going on while you’re having your coffee and donuts! 🙂
Renew you!
…..there are no ordinary moments! When you sit in a park and think nothing is happening – STOP – and say NO, everything is happening! – Peaceful Warrier, Dan Millman
So true, that’s a great book and a great movie! 😉
Amit, this is an outstanding post . . . including the clever illustration. You’ve discussed one of the main challenges I’ve recognized in my life: To keep repeated things new through our own attitudes and ways of seeing and thinking. You’ve given some excellent ideas here.
I once wrote, “Childhood ends when life as discovery ends and life as repetition begins.” Isn’t that exactly what you’re getting at?
I think that one of the psychological problems is that our survival programming tends to put anything familiar into the more or less unattended background . . . because if it has been with us long enough or often enough to be familiar, it can’t kill us. Unfortunately that efficiency mechanism also rusts our ability to appreciate familiar things by really noticing them. Someone we have to learn to see the unfamiliar in the familiar.
It was said of Goethe that he would see more in an hour’s trip close to home than most people would see in a trip around the world.
I hope you don’t mind the imitation, but you’ve inspired me to write more about these ideas on PEGASUS.
I meant “SOMEHOW we need to learn to see the unfamiliar in the familiar.”
Life is cyclic…yes I agree with you if we talking about the nature. about sun, moon and earth. but us as human, working from 9 to 5, nowadays, more and more people want to get out from this routine.
For example to get financial freedom. I have to push my self and get motivated everyday to achieved this.
Hey Fleming, thank you for your kind comments, I’m honoured if it’s inspired you to go write more, I can’t wait to read yours also! 😀
Hi Danny,
I understand where you’re coming from. But there will always be repetition, whether you’re doing a 9-5 or running your own business. As I said the secret is to renew your vision of the cycles by seeing them in different ways. No two days are alike, but there are many similarities.