begin again
Good morning and Happy Sunday, beautiful people.
I am writing to you today from Ohio, where I am visiting with a friend and colleague. This morning I finished my reread of The Power of Myth; I found myself shaking my head, slightly sheepish, as I read about our sense of time and circles. Why sheepish? Only a few weeks in and I failed in publishing on the schedule I set for myself. If you'd checked back last Sunday and Wednesday, my apologies.
In reflecting on this miss, I am also reminded of James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.
No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up - you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time.
Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.
[…]
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follow. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. (Chapter 16)
Campbell talks about how in our modern, digitized world, we are presented with the passage of time as linear; we have clocks that can literally show us the passing in milliseconds, speeding by faster than we can comprehend. This can lead us to think about life being linear and when we don’t accomplish what we set to in the day, we fail and we can’t get it back. I’m not arguing that there is not value in marking the passage of our days and the progress we make on our endeavors. But, there is also value in looking out to see the circles/cycles reflected in our spherical world: the rising and the setting of the sun is my personal favorite.
It does not happen at the same time every day, but it always occurs. I take a lot of comfort in knowing this and when my day does not go as planned I try to find the sunset, take a breath, get some good sleep, get up to see the sunrise, and begin again.
Where’s an area you could benefit from seeing your life more as a cycle as less as a straight line? Is there a new habit you are trying to form or an old habit that you are trying to break that you can use Clear’s suggestion to “never miss twice”?
