When we see our lives only as a linear path from here to there, A to B, we put ourselves at the risk of endless comparison between 'where I am' and 'what might have been'. It's a comparison that does not often support us well, and it fuels an orientation that values youth ('I still have time to get to where I'm supposed to be') over age ('time is running out'). There is another way to look - to see that in many ways, alongside our achievements and disappointments, life is a circling. We move in a circular way, carrying, as Nick Cave writes, "all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are". It is in It is "this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn". 

This week's Turning Towards Life is hosted, as always, by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

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Turning Towards Life, a week-by-week conversation inviting us deeply into our lives, is a live 30 minute conversation hosted by Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn of Thirdspace.  Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google, Amazon Music and Spotify.

Episode Overview
00:00 Introduction to Turning Towards Life
02:00 Exploring Nick Cave's Insights
06:01 The Circular Nature of Life
12:05 Rethinking Time and Progress
17:52 The Impact of Human Constructs
23:52 Embracing the Journey of Life

Here's our source for this week:

Circling Around

S: So essentially what you’re doing as an artist is constantly stumbling forward.

N: Stumbling forward is a beautiful way of putting it Seán, but I wonder if the notion of forwardness is correct.  Perhaps what I mean to say is that although we feel we are moving in a forward direction, in my estimation we are forever moving in a circular way, with all the things we love and remember in tow, and carrying all our needs and yearnings and hurts along with us, and all the people who have poured themselves into us and made us what we are, and all the ghosts who travel with us.  It’s like we are running towards God, but that God’s love is also the wind that it pushing us on, as both the impetus and the destination, and it resides in both the living and the dead.  Around and around we go, encountering the same things, again and again, but within this movement things happen that change us, annihilate us, shift our relationship to the world.  It is this circular reciprocal motion that grows more essential and affirming and necessary with each turn.

From Faith, Hope and Carnage - by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan


Photo by Erlend Ekseth on Unsplash