I’ve been thinking lately about spirals. They are used in media to represent instability—the dizzy spells of injured cartoon characters or dysfunctional people who are “spiraling” out of control. Spirals stand in opposition to their cousin, the circle, which in western metaphors is typically stable, eternal, and complete. We are taught to pursue the qualities of circles, to make predictable and long-standing decisions that will not get away from us, however unrealistic that proposition actually is.
According to encyclopedia.com, “A spiral is a curve formed by a point revolving around a fixed axis at an ever-increasing distance.” This feels more like human life to me. Time passes and our experiences build, so even when we make what seems to be the same decisions, they are different—changed by time and all that has happened in the interim. Each “same” decision then becomes more and more distant from the first, building on the all that came before it.
What I mean to say is: I picked up my guitar again yesterday after months of silence. Today, I played for a little over an hour, learning new songs, and remembering old ones. My fingertips are sore and tender, having adjusted to not pressing for hours on metal strings. My arm aches all the way through my shoulder, no longer used to contorting around the hollow wooden body or to the repetitive motion of strumming.
It’s been 10 years now since I bought my first acoustic guitar. I was living alone in another country and something about that made me feel bold and motivated to become a more interesting, more dynamic person. I had found myself drawn to those with the skill and courage to show up to open mics and perform, and decided on a whim that I could be one of those people if I wanted to. Eventually, my skill plateaued and I turned my attention toward other things, but I never stopped wanting to play the guitar. I return to it again and again, sometimes keeping at it for months, sometimes weeks, sometimes days. I never really lose all of my skills, and I never really commit to it enough to gain any.
Today, as I searched my mind for songs to play and whatever triggers would remind me where to put my hands and how to move them, I was affronted with other memories. I thought about my friend in that foreign country teaching me a chord progression in a song he liked—one of the only ones I am confident enough to play in public today. I thought about learning love songs to play for my partner at the time and all the subsequent dates and partners to whom I revealed my talent. I thought about someone I knew who once said my voice was like an angel’s. I thought about standing on a stage in my favorite bar performing for a crowd that included my future husband’s family and how his mother put in a request for me to be her daughter-in-law on that day. Each time I play, I build on all of that, making the spiral grow wider.
All of my hobbies and interests tend to spiral in this way. I learned to rock climb as a child, lost my consistency, and then spent years in a near constant state of “trying getting back into climbing.” I write poetry, but not always. I study languages in spurts. I try to learn to sew about once a year. I knit 80% of a baby blanket everytime I learn a friend is expecting, but never finish it. Almost every craft or pastime I’ve ever enjoyed has its points along the spiral when I will return to it.
It used to bother me—this starting and stopping. I thought I was supposed to be more like a circle, that I was supposed to commit to learning something, master it, and then enfold it into my life before starting on to the next thing. In my head, I think it looked like this: Now that I have mastered guitar, I will learn Spanish. Now that I am fluent in Spanish, I will learn to grow my own food, and so on. It troubled me that I couldn’t stay on a single path in order to do that. I realized some time later that mastery is an illusion. In each of my pursuits, there has always been more to learn and more to do—I’ve always wanted to do and be so much more than any one person is really capable of.
So, now my hobbies recur throughout my life as points along that ever progressing spiral with little thought of reaching some level of expertise. I get motivated to pick up a guitar and am flooded with all the lovely memories that are tied to it. I get to experience the joy of playing and learning right now and the connection to all the versions of myself I have been as I’ve held this instrument in the past. I’m coming to understand that this kind of connection to my life is more meaningful than some external marker of success. I am not spiraling out of control, but through time, revisiting the experiences that have made me, and experiencing them again in new iterations.
It’s like rewatching a movie, listening again to a favorite song, or rereading a beloved book. You bring the latest version of yourself to everything you do, no matter how many times you have done it before, and in doing so come away with something different. This is how we give depth to our lives, how we make meaning out of our experiences, and how we create and recreate ourselves. It doesn’t matter if our efforts are not continuous. It matters only that the efforts are ours.
