The Cycle of Life
Life mostly runs in cycles.
Days, weeks, meetings, commutes. The loops repeat until they blur.
Most of the time we’re just playing our roles inside them, doing what’s expected. Whether you spend five hours or fifteen hours on something, it may look all the same from the outside.
But the rare moments that fall outside the cycle are the ones that force attention.
A redundancy conversation, a sudden deadline, an unexpected disruption. These moments break the rhythm, and because they don’t belong to the pattern, people notice. Even if the outcome itself isn’t extraordinary, the fact that it happened off-beat makes it memorable.
I’ve realised there are a few levers that shape how much meaning you can pull from life:
Doing the unexpected breaks people out of their trance.
Making someone play a role shows how much of life is performance, and how quickly identity can shift when the script changes.
Setting a deadline and making it public creates a kind of compression - time shrinks, attention sharpens, and things start to move that would have otherwise dragged on. Even if the target isn’t met, the act of trying in plain sight breaks the loop and leaves a mark.
The experience of something new - whether uncomfortable or comfortable - because only by living through it does the learning actually land.
None of that matters, though, without.. perspective.
Perspective is what decides whether the experience is just noise or something you’ll learn and carry forward.
Going in, it sets where your attention will land.
While you’re in it, it may filter what you notice and what you ignore.
Afterwards, it fixes the story you’ll tell yourself and remember.
Two people can live through the same event, but the frame they bring in and the perspective they take out determines whether it becomes a burden, a breakthrough, or just another Tuesday.
That, I think, is the point.
Cycles keep us steady, but it’s the breaks in the cycle - and the perspective we wrap around them - that create value, and meaning.