OUR FRACTAL LIVES

From my forthcoming book, “How We Choose To Show Up”

Years of research prove a sad finding. Many of us live mostly by default. We show up with a limited understanding of ourselves, and superficial readiness to make the most of “right now”.[1] In a nutshell, what Socrates calls the “examined life” has become scarce.

We simply haven’t taken the time to discover the overarching patterns that define us. Much of our lives follow blueprints passed from elders in far lands.

These hereditary blueprints shape our personal puzzle pieces. Indents of diligence, curiosity, compassion, flexibility, honesty and the rest of who we are start in our DNA and our childhood homes. These predispositions and early learnings seduce us to interact in certain ways.

We fit with the familiar. It breeds preference.

But familiarity is often not happiness. The flipside of our positive traits are often unhealthy. Guilt, victimhood, low self-esteem, thin communication. When we don’t see them, we can’t make conscious choices about how to interact. Then our silent patterns — our true partners — have already written our next chapter. Perhaps they’ve written all our chapters.

These behaviors, if remaining in the dark, subsume our lives. Their epicycles often encompass generations before and after. They form relationship tessellations around us. We seek friends, work and home environments that support — and even reinforce — these behaviors. They’re our fit on all sides. Our familiar, our comfort, our opioid, our temptress.

They’re the precedent we imitate, animate and fulfill. Well served we are to wake to them, and to choose.

Like M. C. Escher, and Douglas Hofstadter[2], I invite you to perceive and enter the endless levels of worlds in which we live. We are at once points on many trajectories, self, work, parenthood, friend, learner, thinker, creator. We bring our habits, predispositions and context to all parts of life, across time.

Though these trajectories appear to proceed as separate theaters of life, each is gifted full, head-to-toe slices of us. Work does not just get our professional self. We bring family relations, exercise performance and food choices to our desks.

This is how we happen across time and domain, living as infinite, tunneled reflections in our own mirrors. Why? Because our perspective and behavior originates with us and refers to us. We reflect back. It can be no other way.

This is the self-defined recursive spiral we’re all in. Day to day it feels loose, flexible, non-linear and dynamic. Even fun, free and improvisational, while also being adaptive, supporting our success or lack thereof, based on whether we take time to think, or to choose.

OUR PATTERNS DOMINATE UNTIL WE SHINE A LIGHT ON THEM, AND DECIDE TO CHANGE THEM.

Failing to reflect on our patterns is their life blood. It’s why we click with and seek the same type of partners and friends, after experiencing negative outcomes. It’s in large part why we believe we underachieve, which over 80% of us do, based on my twenty years of research.[1]

Without reflecting, even if we plan, it is blind. Achieving is a dynamic and coiled journey. It’s a mobius strip of considering what got us here and planning our next step.

Just as the structure of veins in leaves parallel the structure of the tree, our behavior today creates the path of our lives. It reveals our degree of consideration and discipline across all endeavors. In this way, our predilection or hesitancy for contemplation is carried with our drinks from the bar to the table, back home into our children’s lives, to work on Monday, the gym and voting booth.

Our achievements scale, as do our failures. They do so daily, with permutations of scent, taste, contour, durability, fragility, hue, timbre and tone. It’s why these choices of how to show up for each activity of our lives endlessly reinforce the shapes and decorations of who we are. Get them right over time, and we’ve gotten them right across our lives.

Let’s take the time to examine our lives and patterns. Once we know ourselves, we can achieve more.

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Are You Solo? Or Alone?

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You’re choosing to do that? How we invest our time, emotions and attention.