Monday, May 17, 2010

We Need a Weather Forecast for People

They say everything moves in cycles, and I know for a fact that I have some pretty clear cycles of my own, both good and bad. My husband is all too aware of them. Its weird - I have no idea what triggers the bad ones, but I'll go from feeling like I can take on the world to feeling like everything is going wrong. After whatever period of time, I get sick of the funk and give myself a good kick in the butt, shake it off and head back to it.

You can imagine what a joy I was while pregnant. My husband should probably be sainted. Lucky for him I only broke one door during those 9 months, during a short lived hormonal rage. True story.

Anyway, in thinking about these cycles I ended up thinking about hurricanes. Quite a perfect parallel actually. To form and sustain, hurricanes need:
1. Favorable conditions to form
2. A way to feed themselves and grow stronger

Also worth noting is that when an energy source is changed or removed, it can stop the cycle. On the flip side, one large system can trigger other cycles. I've watched a lot of hurricanes heading towards the Gulf, closely monitoring the news as they moved and changed. I was even in a Category 4 once (Hurricane Georges) in the Dominican Republic. The sheer power of being in a storm like that was incredibly humbling and left me feeling pretty powerless myself. The destruction it left in its wake was horrible.

Its kind of the same thing for us too, I think. We all have things that set us off, or that trigger us in a good way. Conditions are set up, the means for it to spiral is set, and it grows and expands, and lays either a path of destruction or a path of creation. I guess the thing to know is that with whatever kind of cycle we're in, it can be interrupted and changed - if we know how to do that. And with the bad cycles, I definitely want that power.

Mainly though, I want to get a handle on how to trigger, maintain and feed those good cycles. They're way more fun, and certainly cause less damage to my doors.

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