Our furnace started making loud clanking noises on one of the coldest days of the year. It’s old, but not as old as we are; nevertheless, it needs to be replaced.
As with everything in life, one event leads to another. Everything in the tiny furnace room of our even older banked house had to be removed. This is where I store lots of old office records, papers, books. Sedimentary layers of chart notes, financial records, my writings, my student papers, even memorabilia—a reward card—from my Mother’s dress shop. Who knew, that in 1953, her little dress shop had such things? I had forgotten! Time merges, condenses into cardboard boxes. Reading old papers, memos, notes, themes recur, and yet there is change too.
Over forty years ago, in graduate school, I created for myself my theory of a “life map.” Years later my conceptualization was encapsulated in Charles Wakefield’s book Healing The Child Within! Synchronicity of thought is also part of time convergences!
The life map—mine and his—consists of a graph with a straight line moving toward an upward point. Around this line, however, imagine a spiral. Consider the line as an individual’s life theme, that which defines a unique life, including psychological complexes, as Carl Jung would call them. Such complexes are our life’s theme, our life’s work to transform, or evolve to greater awareness.
What about the spiral around this theme? If we are on a journey to psychological health and wholeness, when we have a setback, we often feel like we are at square one, down at the bottom, at the start of the trajectory upward.
Instead, we are spiraling around our life theme so that when we are in the downward turn of the spiral we are still further along in our journey. And so it is, we spiral. From being on the upswing and consolidation of our learning about ourselves, and then slip again into old patterns of reactivity, old narratives. What is important to remember, is that we can be vectoring toward growth and wholeness if we choose to keep learning about ourselves.