zooming out reveals the patterns

Stop! Inhale! this is your rest station. You have been walking for so long. The road, the view you are seeing is perfect, however it might not how you want it to be necessarily. You need to stop. Not because you are tired, lost or unsatisfied, but because you’ve been moving for so long that you’ve forgotten to look where you are actually going. The sun rises, you wake up, go to work, the sun sets and you come home and die. It feels like it’s your endless cycle. The sun rises and it sets, it never rests. The day that are going to surprise you are on the horizon. Days that throws you the cakes that you’ve lived almost 2/3 portion of your time. Maybe the way you are walking is not reaching you to the place you want to see.

Feels like, the same white-stripped old bus takes you to your workplace. You cannot distinguish today from yesterday and this month form the previous one. The color of your coffee is always darkish brown. The people around you comes to you in different dresses but with the same words. The other consecutive parallel line moves unnoticeably. Your parents are getting older. Your spine has crooked, your back started to get hurt. Your friends are getting married, and are on the verge of being responsible parents. Your experience of facing problems are getting matured. You know how to communicate, they don’t scare you anymore. You are closer to find your true calling, you know how you want to die. Your income feels stable and works in your favor every time. You are celebrating another successful anniversary with your partner. Meanwhile, your hobbies are placed on a corner of a store room, full of dusts covering it. Your friend circle has reduced dramatically. You started to enjoy the coffee alone. You don’t expect someone will come to save you and take this life as your complete responsibility. It seems like the days are being repeated but the context they’ve evolved. Ah.. 

Assume yourself climbing up a mountain. You are walking and walking without looking backward. The views on the right and left are almost similar, and you are not seeing the pinnacle yet. You are taking pauses in between and moving forward. You are somewhere along the way, but you don’t actually know where you are. There is no map.

Your life is similar to the way you were walking above. The days are almost identical and indistinguishable from one another. Today from tomorrow tells you almost nothing. Now, in order to see the changes and the progress you have made, you have to look back at the way you have come along. Because you were climbing a mountain, it is obvious that you can literally see the progress you’ve made. Nothing is different from this; although the days seem similar, the week, the month, and the year will show your progress. You just have to take a break to look back.

In the middle of the forest, if you could look back or zoom out yourself and see from an eagle’s eye, you could see the city that lies behind the mountain, the hundreds of similar mountains with stories similar to yours. The art of seeing yourself from that eagle’s eye shows you your location.

Let us see what the eagle’s eyes show you. The friend from your school whom you used to play with when you were five is now raising a five-year-old daughter. The last bencher in your high school, whom you used to think was not going to achieve anything, is now running a multimillion-dollar company. The cheek muscles of your parents have loosened up, and the wrinkles around their foreheads are noticeably visible. Your best friend has disappeared from your life. Your 256 KB memory card has evolved into 2 TB. While you are repeating your routine, everything around you has evolved. These changes were merely visible because you were busy living each individual day. 

Have you seen a dog chasing its tail and circling around? Have you ever noticed the loop that makes you chase the tail?

You wake up, go to work, come back home, set aside some time for endless scrolling, and then sleep. The routine repeats.

Or, you doomscroll at 3 AM, loneliness hits you hard, you seek attention, and then you find a temporary connection that disappoints you, which again pushes you toward the same loneliness.

Or, you see someone showing their art online. You overthink and wish to learn it yourself. You postpone it, find another person or another thing, feel guilty about yourself, and it goes on and on.

Or, you see someone doing business online. You set a goal to start something. You become so excited, you act, and you work intensely. After some days, you lose the momentum. It collapses after a while, and you again find another goal.

The cycle repeats.

It is not calculative for a specific day, but the pattern is visible if you could remember how the pattern started and collapsed afterward.

All of a sudden, we get motivated to start living a different life. Movies, books, or other external sources could be the reason behind it. The life rules, habits of successful people, and personalities can attract us to imitate someone. We want to change our current self into an ideal version of ourselves. We buy new books to read, make new plans, buy new clothes to wear, etc. Some of us even change jobs.

Although a person might change the environment, the pattern remains the same. Perhaps the biggest reason we do not want to zoom out is that we will not like what we see afterward. A person who is 40 years of age does not want to hear his age, even seldom. He hates it.

If we look closely, the problem is not our circumstances; it is the patterns we are avoiding. Although we change our jobs, we carry the same habits and end up being the same employee as before. We meet new people but repeat the same relationship dynamics; they treat us the way our old friends did. No matter what plans we make, we go back to repeating those patterns, almost unnoticeably.

Zooming out does not mean we have to judge our life or compare it to others. It basically means seeing our life more accurately and making each decision deliberately. No matter how comfortable we are on our couch, if we are scared of questioning why we have been resting in a specific position for so long, we might never find a the place we actually are born to experience. 

Time is going to pass either way. We can walk in the same shoes or find another pair. Zooming out is not that scary because it shows us that time has taken something precious from us, but it has also built something alongside us. Each day feels the same, but it is preparing us to become something more. This can be figured out if we stop and zoom out to see what it is bringing within us and around us.

Finding the problem is 90% of the solution. Similarly, escaping from the loop is about recognizing the loop itself. We have to stop and look backward first. There must be habits: mini, micro, noticeable, or unintentional, that shape our days. Without habits, the clock does not move.

If we compare ourselves to our previous self, perhaps from six months ago, we might be able to see the changes. If we are willing to look closely, we could find the pattern and when the habit started.

In a much broader sense, we all have an idea of whether a habit is pushing us toward becoming the person we want to be. Either it is taking us toward the positive side of the graph, the negative side, or keeping us stuck somewhere in between.

Questions like: What keeps frustrating us? What are we repeatedly postponing? What type of person are we repeatedly becoming? What are we doing that is not taking us anywhere?

If we are not scared to ask these questions of ourselves, we might begin to see the pattern. Once we see the pattern, we can possibly work on it.

As we’ve stopped, watched where we’ve come from, and observed what’s going all around us, we have somehow figured out that we are not just where we are now; we’ve come so far. Time does this to everything inevitably. The Earth must revolve, and the skin must wrinkle. Although the same day seems to come tomorrow, it is a completely different day from the one six months ago, or even further back.

Some of your habits may be the same. The way you approach a new day may be the same. We have two things on our plate now: we are not just repeating the same days, and yet a lot of things have not changed at all. Those are our patterns.

Both of these discoveries could possibly make us more aware of our past and our future life experiences.

Putting things all together, we have experienced that life will pass us in the same way as it is moving now. Another day comes, and another sun sets in the west.

Perhaps, the point of zooming out is not to see how far we’ve come. It is to realize the roads we’ve been walking on, the patterns we’ve been repeating, and the direction we’ve been taking. Walking the same road for a long time does not mean we cannot take the leap to walk where we actually want to go.