At the risk of sounding platitudinous: life can be horribly frustrating. You feel like you’re finally getting somewhere, and then you mess things up again (in the way you always do) and you’re right back at square one, stuck in your familiar, depressing rut. Round and round you go in the same old circle, never seeming to make any progress, until you finally lose that most precious of commodities: hope.
But consider this: what if you were going round and round, but in a way that is actually OK — normal, healthy, desirable, even? What if, despite all your cock-ups and self-chastisements, you were actually getting somewhere, just on a slightly more roundabout trajectory to the one you had imagined?
We all know that you sometimes have to take “two steps forward, one step back”; that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”; that “progress doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigs and zags in fits and starts”, as President Barack Obama said just a decade ago (it now feels like a rather prescient remark).