I have this theory I'm working on. I'm going to call it the Theory of Circles and Strings.
People seem to have this ridiculous idea thanks to things like timelines and words like "progress" and "moving forward" that we all move in straight lines. I submit we move in circles.
We start moving in these circles, or spiraling circles if you will, around the age of 5 when we start school. This government mandated circle starts out very large as everyone is required to go to school. As the years drag on however people drop out for various reasons and so the spiraling circles get smaller. After 13 to 19+ years of the Academic Spiral we find we have spent the vast majority of our lives sitting at a desk longing to go outside for recess. We spend our formative years sitting at a desk, listening to someone talk; as our bodies and minds grow, change, and develop. The whole time it's home to school to home to school to home to school. We sleep, wake, go to school, go home, do homework, and repeat.
Once we leave the Academic Spiral we find ourselves on the Career Spiral. Once again it starts out very large as many of those drop outs from school are now amongst the working peoples (and have been for a while). We spend this whole time getting up, going to work, working, coming home from work, going to bed, and doing it all over again the next day. We spend the VAST part of our adult lives going home to work, home to work, home to work, home to work. hardly a variation, unless we switch jobs for some reason. And even at that, it's the same sort of spiraling circle, just in a different location.
Regardless of whether or not we "move up" in the company hardly matters to the Career Spiral. We simply keep going around and around, watching the spiral shrink as people retire, go on disability, die, win the lottery, or whatever. We continue on this spiral until we near the age 65, give or take.
There's usually some point on this spiral where most people stop spinning long enough to look around, which is typically a shocking experience and leads to some form of crisis. We stop, we look around, and we realize that we have become our parents, our children have had children, and there is this grinning little five year old face looking into yours, about to start the Academic Spiral, and it looks ever so familiar and you sadly remember you used to have a face like that. We then run to the nearest mirror and peering in we realize that we are no longer that young, thin, energetic person with hopes and dreams, but rather a lined and wrinkled, not so thin person with no energy, problems, worries, and a mortgage.
After the Career Spiral we enter the Retirement Spiral whose size is constantly influx thanks to athletes and other people who can't figure out whether or not they actually want to retire. The size and duration of the retirement spiral is completely irrelevant because it invariably ends in a pine box at the bottom of a rectangular hole.
Invariably, and with growing frequency as we get older, we ask: What happened? How did we get... old?
Remember as child how we used to spin and spin and spin as fast as we could, and no matter how hard we tried to stay in place we always moved away from the place we started? I think it's like that. We spend our lives spinning, thinking we're not really going anywhere, and the next thing you know we are the grandparents and our lives are almost gone.
Frightening isn't it?
I think there are a few kinds of people on any given spiral - those that who get eaten by it and turn into zombies, those who simply go along with it and generally end up slightly cynical with a dash of regret and bitterness, and those who turn the spiraling circles into a string.
String people are those individuals who seem to utterly escape the spiral. The string is sometimes a straight line, a squiggle, or even occasionally a spiral, but never for long. They are those lucky individuals who never go to work, but go to do what they love every day and get paid for it. These are not the work-a-holics (those are the zombies), but the people that love whatever it is they do. They also seem to be the people that never get old. They die young at 105 years old. And even after they die they live on because the mark they left on the lives of the people they came in contact with cannot be forgotten or erased. They're the people that feel like they're always with you, even years after they're gone.
I envy the string people. I want to be a string person.
But the question is: How do you become a string person?
