The Vicious Cycle
PARTONEOFTHREE
Stagnate is a pungent word. When I hear it, my mind conjures thoughts of a slimy pool of putrid smelling water, motionless with a translucent film covering the brownish green ingredients. As if we were describing a neglected birdbath, we often use the word stagnate to describe our job, relationship, even life itself. It's when we feel the need to stir things up, add something fresh hoping to take away the stench, or at least mask it. However, like the neglected pool of water, unless we continue to agitate it, do something different, it will soon return to its former state. It's a vicious circle, or perhaps vicious cycle is a better phrase.
The vicious circle or cycle that inevitably creates the path leading to stagnation, will never change unless we do. Unless we transform ourselves, the best we can hope for is to occasionally stir up the muck just enough for us to endure the stench. Unless we change the way we think, each journey we embark on leads to the same destination. When we continually find ourselves returning to the same place, regardless of the path we've decided to embark, we'll forever live in the past, reliving familiar circumstances again and again.
We are both consciously and unconsciously making decisions based wholly on our memorized emotional response to our experiences. With our subconscious in primary control, each step we take has a predicted outcome, always leading us to stare into the brownish green soup of the same stagnate pool.
If thinking has repeatedly lead us to the same lackluster destination, doesn't it make sense that thought can also shepherd us somewhere new and different; a place we're meant to be, minus the toxicity we've needlessly endured?
Before a new course can be charted, we first must understand that life doesn't happen to us, we happen to life. We weren't placed here to live as a mere pinball to bounce about, left to the fate of bumpers, levers, and bells that decide to bat us about. We absolutely must take responsibility for our current place in life, wherever we are, whatever destination we've arrived at, lays directly at our feet. When the need arises to point our finger at the blame for our current circumstance, we need only look in a mirror; we are the only ones with the ability to plot a course that leads to sustainable change.
Be the catalyst to cause an effect, don't live as a victim of cause and effect.
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