CYCLES

Sunrise. 1965. Lithograph by Roy Lichtenstein.

I’ve been thinking about how different careers can give your life a certain shape. 

As in: there are some careers that follow a cyclical pattern, meaning they are made up of units that repeat. Any version of teaching or training is like this, as is any job that is seasonal (or one whose rhythm is heavily dedicated to the seasons. I’m thinking: tax preparer, department store Santa, park ranger). Service jobs or healthcare jobs have a little bit of this cycle feeling too, doing the similar thing for people over and over again. Sure, you grow and advance and expand in these roles, but your fundamental goal is the same for every cycle.

Then there are linear careers. I think of these as jobs about making money—entrepreneurship, tech jobs, corporate jobs, anything where shareholders are involved. With these jobs, the goal is growth above all else. These seem to have a kind of relentless forward march feeling and a burn-the-bridges-behind-you sensibility. If you can't tell, these jobs are not for me. I find them roundly uninspiring.  

But I think there is a third category of career: the big-chapter jobs. Imagine you’re a successful film writer/director and you have, perhaps, eight movies that you can get through in your lifetime. Or you’re a restaurateur and your career is made of those handful of restaurants you started and saw to their end. A novelist spends their life writing, what? ten books? A scientist might divide up their career into major findings or large scale research projects. Each of these things is a big chapter, spanning years, that collect to make up a more episodic life story. 

Each of these work modes offer dramatically different ways to live and think about life. To be a politician whose career is a series of terms has a totally different shape than the middle school teacher who cycles through the same curriculum every year, eventually teaching the children of their first students, but teaching, essentially, the same thing. And that’s different from the finance bro who is working to make sure quarterly earnings are perpetually on the rise. Who is different from the stand-up comedian who puts out five or six specials in a career and is considered a success.  

I’m not totally sure what I find interesting about this line of thought. Perhaps, I like to wonder if professional orientations mirror people's personal orientations towards life. Meaning, what is life for people? How do they conceptualize it? What shape does it have? Is it a linear progression? An accumulation of acquiring more and more experiences, wisdom, possessions? Or is it a cyclical progression, a rhythmic kind of dance through the years and seasons where you just keep up with the changing music? Or an episodic saga, overstuffed with a handful of large chapters that chunk your path from dawn to dusk? I know it’s all of these things. And I know there are probably other orientations that one could describe, but in my wonderings, these are the big three. 

Also interesting to me: each of these modes of mapping life has a different capacity for stasis. The constant progression business-bro mode has no stasis. It’s constant motion and achievement. I’m imagining an upper management person who works twelve hour days, and who owns a sterile condo that they pay someone else to clean, a condo which has a refrigerator that only has a bottle of mustard in it. There is no valuing of stasis, of home, of rest. Or if there is rest, it happens in Cabo, not on the couch. This archetype is forever moving, a predatory shark who must swim or die.

The big-chapter orientation has temporary stasis. Moments of life that have certain characteristics. Raising children can make life a big-chapter ordeal as every decade of your children’s life colors your own. And all the creative professions have big-chapter-mode feels. Here the archetype is maybe the very artistically sincere musician: each album is years in the making, created in spans of time between tours, each time with its own locations and circumstances and inter-band politics. And thus each album has its own tone and mood and message. And then it’s released like a backwards time capsule for the world to own. A life as a discography, a grand arc made of a half-dozen artifacts.       

The cyclical/repetition model is the most conducive to stasis, and that is probably why I seek it out. There is the feeling of rehearsal in it. The feeling of study. It’s a very writerly feeling, slow and quiet and careful. What’s the archetype here? For some reason, the first image that pops into my head is the camp counselor, tasked with maintaining an environment that doesn’t change all that much and flows with the seasons and with the even rising tide of kids on summer break. Every June, it’s different campers, and yet the campers are always the same. They act the same way and want the same things and have the same failures and triumphs. Maybe the sneakers and haircuts change, but the basic plot doesn't, like a film on a loop: hike, bonfire, canoe, archery, talent show, Every year, back and forth, over and over.

Perhaps the real reason that I keep traveling down this line of thought is that the linear mindset—with its forward motion, disinterest in stasis, and constant growth—is a way of life that I find empty and a little upsetting. The big-chapter model is better but there's something about it I find off-putting, even a little lonely. I'm a person looking for stasis, for stillness. But isn't everybody? Doesn't everyone want a place to call home? Even those of us with non-cyclical careers, even the investment bankers and pharma CEOs and television executives, aren't we all just pushing ourselves towards a time where we can...(What's the right word?)...where we can just fucking rest. Like really, truly rest. Just for a little while.

Perhaps that is not what everyone is after. I don't really know.

But there's something about this inquiry that stirs something in me that I can't quite explain. It's like a brilliant answer discovered in a dream, that would only make sense in your waking life if you could remember what the question was, or if there even was one.

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Summer is coming to an end today, at least for me. There are still several August weeks left and plenty of warm weather, but I’m a cyclical worker and my summer cycle is done. Today is a perfect day for the transition, too. It’s overcast and damp. I can still keep the windows open but I’m wearing sweatpants for the first time in a long time. The markings of the season in my Chicago neighborhood—traffic-stopping block parties and street festivals; sidewalk sales and farmers markets on my neighborhood’s main drag; families suddenly on the street in full force moving from event to event in varying degrees of stress—are fading. 

I’m going to bring the house plants in today. I'll spend the afternoon finding the best spot to show off each one’s new dense growth. They are all fairly simple green things—hoyas and ZZs and monsteras and sansevierias. They’ll come inside today and find the spot where they spend a long, hard winter. They’ll lose a lot of that growth by the time they hit February and they will greet next year’s spring sun looking a little sickly and thin. I’ll cut them back, hack off those few overgrown limbs that will have grown long and lean, desperate to find more sun, and they’ll grow into a new and better shape. 

I have this jade that grew out of cuttings from the giant plant my grandmother had—my grandmother who has been dead for twenty years. I’m not sure how many times I’ve had to replant a cutting from that original one, but I still think of it as the same plant. My grandmother had a small greenhouse on the southern edge of her home. It had small loose gravel for a floor and always had that fantastic greenhouse air: unmoving, and dryly hot, but also earthy and clean.

Her house—the same house where my mother and her many sisters grew up—seemed ancient. It had no running water, but did have a hand pump on the front lawn and an outhouse in the back. To this day, I feel something like pride remembering that I spent my childhood using an outhouse on snowy Christmas weekends and sweaty July afternoons and didn't think it was strange. 

The dining room was where we all got together for holiday dinners—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter. There was built-in cabinetry and shelves on the north wall of that room and on the bottom shelf to the left was a wooden gumball machine. The machine was really just a tall wooden box, about the size of a quart milk carton. It had a glass front to show off its contents and a little drawer on the bottom. When you pulled out the drawer you saw that it was a solid piece of wood with one gumball sized hole drilled through it. If you held your hand underneath the drawer, the gumball would fall into your hand.

My cousins and I would go to our grandmother, who was always in the kitchen, and ask her if we could have a gumball, and she would tell us yes or no. They were cheap, chalky gumballs that lost their nondescript sugar flavor within seconds. But it was always a thrill when she said yes, and it was always a comfort that the machine was always there, and always full.

If you go online and look at an aerial map of where my grandmother’s house once stood, all you see is a treeless subdivision. I haven’t seen most of those aunts, uncles, and cousins since we scattered my grandmother's ashes, and I probably never will. I also haven’t used an outhouse since then, and I'll probably never do that again either. Hopefully. But, I still have this jade plant.

When we were kids and visiting in the summertime, we would often end the day at the school playground next door. If you walked behind the outhouse, past the tree line, and across a wide field of prairie grass, you would find yourself on a grade school campus. It was the same grade school where my mom and her sisters attended as children and where my grandmother worked in the cafeteria. My grandmother made lunches, from scratch, for all the kids, every day. However, the playground and most of the school building was brand new. When you looked at it, you could see the tiny brick part of it that was old, and then all the new additions that had been added over the years to hold all the new kids and amenities.

We would play on the playground for a long time, until the sun began to set and it was hard to see the jungle gym rungs. And I remember how when I would realize the time, I would pause in that twilight blur and have the uncanny feeling we had been at the playground for more hours than was possible. It was a eerie and thrilling feeling. As if time had stopped and the sun was frozen on the lip of the horizon and we had been too busy to notice.

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References:

Lichtenstein, Roy. "Sunrise." 1965. Offset lithograph printed in colors on lightweight white wove paper, Sotheby's, New York City. Sotheby's.https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/prints-multiples-2/sunrise. Accessed 6 August 2023.