Edited in October 2023.
We’ve all heard it before. It’s never linear.
I used to say this to my friends seeking advice about failures and heartaches. And I would say the same thing to console myself. It’s never linear. Some days are bad, other days are worse, but we hold on for the good days that will soon come, and go.
For many years, I’ve held on to this promise when days turned sour and weeks went by slowly. Sure enough, good days were bound to turn up, eventually.
I had this image in my head that illustrated how it worked. Life progressed like a rotating wheel. And I was either on the upper side of the wheel where days are smooth and happy, somewhere in the middle, or at the bottom where things simply sucked for the time being.
For a while, it was a good image to hold on to, because it seemed to have made sense, so I gladly went through the cycle. I looked forward to good days during the bad, and strived to be present during the good, knowing that I’ll be back in the lower side of the circle soon enough.
The past two months have been tough, to say the least. Lost a couple of relationships, went through a lot of unpleasant changes at work, and my health was suffering at a steady rate. It felt as though I was stuck at the bottom of the wheel for a longer time than I had anticipated. The wheel had stopped turning, I thought. And as much as wanted to go back and turn towards the better side of the wheel, sometimes there is no going back.
I was stuck at the bottom, it would seem.
But knowing that the wheel couldn’t have stopped brought me to the realization that maybe I was never in a cycle, that we don’t simply go in circles. The problem with the wheel was that it ignored one essential variable in progress: Time.
Time doesn’t go in circles. It moves forward and it takes us with it, whether we want it to or not. It is as merciful as it is ruthless.
Progress isn’t linear, neither is it a circle.
In 1958, a man named Charles Keeling began measuring CO2 levels in our atmosphere from the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. If you’ve seen the controversial Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore, then you might have noticed the graph that was formed by Keeling’s studies. It shows the rising and falling of CO2 levels in the atmosphere over a period of time.
Today, the graph is still up to date thanks to a program run by his son Ralph. This is the Keeling Curve over the past two years:
Getting better is like going through this curve. This, to me, is what actual progress looks like.
Our defining moments over the course of any progression, whether it’s of healing, learning, or creating, are like waves. Similar to the wheel, we go up and down through the good and the bad. But unlike a circle, here we move forward. We’re always on our way somewhere. And as uncertain and scary as that sounds, it’s something to keep us excited and on our toes, constantly.
There is a reason, though, for why I chose this particular curve.
I mean, there are thousands of graphs that look like waves, but this one is special. If we looking closer at the waves, we notice how the crest to the right is higher than the one on the left. And the same goes for the troughs, one higher than the previous one. Time moves the graph forward, but it’s progress that pulls it upward. And progress is where effort comes in. Discipline, patience, self control.
But looking at progress as this constant up and down and up and down can be exhausting, especially if we’re so fixated on it. No, getting better is not a linear process, but it doesn’t mean that we have to feel the full force of every rise and every fall.
My good friend CJ, during one of our drunken nights in the streets of Poblacion, reminded me of this a few years ago.
He curled his right hand so it looked like a little telescope, put it over his left palm, and looked into the hole. “This is you right now,” his one eye still peering through his makeshift hand scope, “You’re so focused on this thing that’s weighing you down that you don’t see what’s coming up ahead.”
And he was right. Of course he was. I held a telescope to a wall for too long, I knew I had to take step back to see the rest of the picture.
This is what takes to move forward, not pulled against our will by the curve, but gladly with it.
Part of that is looking ahead, and looking ahead means learning from the past and seeing the present for what it is. Although, this could only be done if we see where we’re going, if we zoomed out.
Literally, zooming out would look something like this:
From the period of 2 years in the first photo to over 50 years in the one above, the graph tells the story.
There is much to look forward to, if we’re only brave enough to look.
I’d like to think our best days are ahead us.
P.S. Yes, I do see the irony of comparing progress with the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. I’m simply using the graph as a way to get my point across. Climate change is real and serious, and we should be taking conscious efforts to curb its effects on our planet.