Cycles
I've been thinking a lot lately about how cyclical life can be. When I made the decision recently to go back to college it felt like such familiar territory; I've been to college 3 separate times (4 if you count my Cal Arts semester) and each time I've quit. Not only that but it felt familiar in an even larger way, that it was a response to a major change in my life; having twins. When we had our daughter I got the desire to change my current lifestyle; to get out and lose all the weight I had gained. It's not like it was a decision made in isolation either. It was the end result of a number of changes that occurred including distancing myself from professional teaching and attempting to go back to college for the 3rd time. In my mind I always justified these decisions as trying to be a good father but really it was much more than that...it was following a cycle. It was experiencing a stress, and reacting to that stress.There are other cyclical things I've noticed as well. I'm becoming more and more like my dad everyday. I bellow laugh at the TV, I have trouble sleeping sometimes, I keep way too much crap in my garage, I'm really interested in computers, guitars, etc. But those things are neither here nor there; he's a man who always did the best he could. I'd like to think I'm the same way.We like to think we are in charge of our decisions; that we make a choice and things happen and then that's how our life turns out. I've slowly come to the thinking that pretty much every choice we make is really just a rationalization; the decision was already made in a split second too fast for you to really be in control of and the "choice" is really an aftermath of you rationalizing it. It's a very fatalistic way of looking at things but I honestly find much comfort in it. It allows me to examine these cycles and really see what was good and what was not so good. If I really am "good" then it means I was always surrounded by good even if it didn't seem that way at the time. And it means I'll keep trying to be better and keep surrounding myself with good.