Fresh Tracks

A few years ago a friend of mine was struggling, and he started talking about the idea that it was a 'pattern' he had with a specific aspect of his life. He pained over the idea that again and again he had found himself feeling stuck in a familiar set of circumstances. Looking at the storyline, the only pattern I saw was one of perception. The suffering was built out of the idea that something about the way he moved through his life was intrinsically wrong and needed resolving. That somehow the actions, behaviours and even feelings of the other people in his life were a function of his own unconscious patterns.

I may be about to suggest something unpopular, or even wrong. But I have a wondering that perhaps we have gone too far in our love of the pattern diagnoses.

I'm sure it's true that each of us has certain tendencies, like snow being pushed into drifts and cornices on a certain aspect of a slope, under the influence of some wind generated in the vaults of our unconscious selves. But it seems overly simplistic to view our choices and mistakes (if there is such a thing) always through this lens of patterning.  To suggest that every time we find ourselves in a seemingly similar situation - having started or failed to start, lost or ended a relationship being the obvious example - that we are repeating a pattern. It's an idea that's popular, but seems off to me. What if that's what life is made of - beginnings and endings? I could be in denial and maybe there are people out there that see me more clearly than I see myself who would say that I am a patterned animal, showing my stripes in identical ways over and over. Or maybe just in the fact that I still do, at my age, enter into, and leave or lose things - jobs, people, homes, pets. Maybe I am the living breathing poster child for all things patterned. Or maybe shit happens and dreams are born and lost and born again and it's up to us what to do with that.

To me, the pattern idea doesn't capture the complex richness of relationships. Love, loss, grief, joy, fear; they are so layered, alive. We are ever-learning, ever-growing creatures. Life is surprising;  presuming to pigeonhole it's evolution and ever-changing textures seems arrogant and one-dimensional. To reduce our human experiences with each other and with the world as if we are wedged into a same-old-same-old groove seems well... unimaginative. We are creative beings, surely once in a while we do something new? Is dropping an old story line that complex? Is it possible, sometimes, to just move out of or into something for the most simple and right reasons? Do we always need to punish ourselves and others for the process of transition?

Maybe I'm playing at semantics here. Because it's not that I don't perceive things in my own life that are echoes of other times, terrain traps that I sometimes find myself being sucked into. But I know that I am a different person now than I was before. Am I defined (other than by some outdated societal norms) by the fact that I've never been married? By my history of beginnings and endings? My relationships have been far from identical to one another, and while there have been a few themes emerging from the narrative maybe they are not defining.  There are outliers. I can't afford to look outward or inward thinking that we are all making the same choices, over and over again. Doomed to relive past hurts in a new form. My experience has been more diverse than that. And I feel hopeful, for myself and for others. Maybe we're all free to decide what we make of the what's-next and the what-went-down-before.

This slope ahead of us is expansive; so clean and rich with possibility. Why do we obsess over what's behind us and the switchbacked labour of the uptrack, when we could just allow ourselves to perceive the untouched lines stretching out before us? If we lean forward (just slightly) and let go, there are fresh tracks to be had.