Circles, wheels, spirographs

The Motivation Futility Cycle is from a perversely funny source called Despair.com, which offers a brilliant response to all the annoying motivational messages that assault in a corporate setting.  (Read through the roster of "demotivators" and tell me which aren't true statements?!!!!)

Initially I saw this as a witty take on how businesses trying to strategize their way out of a bad business situation:  Hmmm, let's reorganize (shift the deck chairs on the Titanic).  Yeah, that'll do it.  Awe, results not so good.  Must have done it wrong. Pinterest, that's it.  Hmmm, no success.  I got it, let's Tweet more!

This takes a more menacing tone when seen as a reflection of patient thinking as they confront illness and diagnosis:  Seek out a new motivational stimulation (hope in a treatment), roll with it enthusiastically (it'll all get better now), learn that it has limits, and crash down into despair, which necessitates seeking out a new motivational stimulation.

Hope is good, new treatments are good.  What is demotivating and exhausting (to me) is not seeing the cycle in perspective (as the flow of samsara and part of the journey on the wheel of life).  More troubling still is not having any idea of what it could mean to step out of it!   Lacking that perspective, all contracts to the energy of three poisons (greed, anger, delusion)as it spins that wheel.

Wheel of Life

A recent patient encounter made me think of this most keenly.  Chaplaincy in that instance seemed most like an opportunity to walk with someone fo a moment in that cycle (since we're both on the wheel of life, it's could be like the intersecting segments in a spirograph) and maybe step with them - if just for a second - onto a by-road for a breath.

Hmm...did I finally discard that spirograph?