Back in college, my then-boyfriend, now-husband loved to play with symbolism and to tie little pieces of life together with references to poetry, art, and philosophy. At the time, he worked on his art a lot more often than he does now, and one symbol he spent a lot of time interrogating was the spiral.
As I've aged, I've found a deeper appreciation for the spiral than I had back then. Mainly because life has a way of repeating the same lessons/experiences over and over in slightly different or expanding ways. I don't know that it's a matter of learning the lesson and then it stops spiraling around. I think it might be more a matter of learning to let the lesson happen outside the core/center of the spiral (ego) and just let it pass through without as deep and effect. An observation of the cycle. "Ah, there we go again."
Right now I'm in the middle of seeing something rather unwanted cycle back into my life and I'm trying very hard to breathe through it, to let it exist on an outer circle from me, but it's a grating thing to have it swinging back by. I'm not sure how long it will last and, the strangest thing is, I want it to last as long as the person bringing this element back around wants it to last.
Let me explain with actual words instead of vagaries.
My father sold life insurance (still does) and I grew up with passionate discussions of financial planning, product design, and sales ideas at family dinners that bored me out of my skull. It's not that life insurance can't be interesting, because it can, as I later found out, but that, as a child/teen, listening to high level discussion of taxation of various financial products was not what I wanted to spend my time thinking or talking about.
Cue my graduation from college. I won't go into the long back story, but essentially, I graduated suma cum laude with a degree that was fairly useless unless I wanted to go to Grad School, and, for reasons, I no longer wanted to go to Grad School. My father is a great salesman in many ways and I've always admired and looked up to him, so when he set his mind to talking me into coming into his financial planning business, it wasn't long before I did.
Here we go with Cycle 2 of this financial planning/insurance gig. This was a long spiral. It still runs in the background of my life in some ways, since I'm still employed by my father as an assistant, but I got out of the sales part of the gig ages ago. And want to get out of the WHOLE DAMN GIG entirely as soon as possible. For that reason, I'm very focused on my career as an author.
Anyway, in the past few years, I've gotten nearly entirely out of the insurance/sales/assistant side of my life. I've cycled far away from it and focused on writing my novels and I've done well! And can do even better, I know it! Regardless, here I am, almost done with this financial planning part of my life, when along comes career unrest for my husband. He's been a long time department manager in a well-known Home & Garden chain.
In a fell swoop, they eliminated the department manager position across the company and left him in a customer service position with eleven months to find a job. Not a bad way to let someone go. Better than, "Bye. You're out of work today!" But, surprisingly, my husband has made friends in the last few years with an insurance salesman who has convinced him to try to give that a try while finishing out his time with the Home & Garden chain.
I immediately felt resistance to this idea for so many reasons. I know this job. Grew up with this job in my face and, well, I'm not sure my husband will find what he's looking for there. But I am not my husband and he isn't me. We have different tolerances for things and I can't say for sure how this will go. I also can't say for sure how much my desire to NOT have this in my life anymore plays into my sandpaper on skin feelings about it all.
I refuse to be unsupportive, though. So I've done my best to cheerlead him as he got his insurance license, went through training, and started to dip his feet into learning about product. Here's where there's a blessing for him and a curse for me in all of this: I know so much more about all of this than he does. I know the terminology, how the products work, why they work, how to work around problems selling them, etc. He comes to me constantly for advice and to ask, "What does it mean when the underwriting guide says XYZ?" And I know the answers.
weeps Hahaha!
We have spent so much time in the last few months talking about insurance! On our romantic trip for his birthday we listened to sales tips via streaming audio during the drive! I am having flashbacks to my childhood vacations and listening to sales audiobooks with my dad at the wheel! And, worse (better?), I am able to then converse knowledgeably with my husband about these sales tapes, tell him tips about what to take seriously from them and what to disregard, and I am chafing because, guys, guys, guysssssss, this is something I've been trying to escape for, like, thirty years!
So it's strange. It's fun in some ways to have something like this to talk with my husband about. I just sort of wish it wasn't EXACTLY this thing. Haha. But it is this thing and so obviously this thing isn't going anywhere in my life just yet. I'm still employed by my father. My brother is still deep in the financial planning world. Now my husband is all about insurance products and how they work. My family life is forever going to be tied to discussions of Whole Life and Term and Disability and return of premiums. Apparently, I can't escape it! I married an artist, guys, and I can't escape it!
What does this mean? Here I am with this cycling hard back into my life, another spiral of it through my day-to-day existence. Obviously, by the fact that I'm making this post, I'm not holding it at quite the distance that I want to hold it. So maybe the lesson here is to let this spiral collapse in on me and just accept it. Take it in. Find a way to deal with it.
The other night I tweeted out something completely unrelated that now seems applicable to this situation. My daughter was making me watch episodes of Friends with her and I tweeted: There is a special kind of dissatisfaction that comes from being forced to watch a tv show you don't hate but don't really like either.
And, yes, similarly there is a special kind of chafing dissatisfaction at being put into a position, yet again, where I need to have in depth, ongoing conversations about something that I don't hate but don't really like either. There's got to be a way to find some deeper joy in it. Maybe, if my husband is actually somewhat successful at this, I'll find some joy in it then. As it is, I'm holding myself poised to deal with the potentiality that this won't work out and that he'll be disappointed, or worse, feel bad about himself, and, ugh, that's a whole other ball of wax.
I've babbled on about this enough. At this point I should tie this up neatly with some mention of spirals and breath and making space and leaning into the discomfort, but I'm not sure I've got anything like that at the moment. Wait, maybe I do! I know that some of my favorite writing advice is to write into the fear. Some of my favorite yoga advice is to breathe into the discomfort. So there's something there, right? Let this spiral collapse into me, breathe into it, lean into it, write into it? I don't know.
I have a party to go to. Happy Saturday. Thanks for reading if you even made it this far!