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I recently came across a wonderful essay by Michael Barrish entitled System. In it, he describes a model for life made up of three stages:
In 1988 Laura and I created a three-stage model of what we called “living process.” We called the three stages Good Thing, Rut, and Transition. As we saw it, Good Thing becomes Rut, Rut becomes Transition, and Transition becomes Good Thing. It’s a continuous circuit.
A Good Thing never leads directly to a Transition, in large part because it has no reason to. A Good Thing wants to remain a Good Thing, and this is precisely why it becomes a Rut. Ruts, on the other hand, want desperately to change into something else.
This pattern immediately made sense to me. In most aspects of my life, I follow this cycle, except that the three stages are never anywhere near equal in length.
If you were to look at the long scale of one of these cycles in my life, it would go something like Good Thing, Rut, Rut, Rut, Rut, Rut, R… Read More