"This Looks Familiar"... - Coming Full Circle..

In almost every film that involves the use of a map, there always seems to be a moment when one character looks around, stops the group and exclaims, “Wait… I recognise this.” It’s often a tree or a bend in the path, or some feature that painfully drags out the conclusion that everyone has just completed a giant, waste-of-timey circle.

There is no sense of metaphor or philosophy here. It is entirely literal. How did we end up back here?

It is generally framed as a cross between a plot hiccup and a kind of abject failure - a wrong turn; a wasted effort; time lost that you will never get back. It is a situation filled with “if onlys” and more than a little judgement from us, way up in the movie theatre peanut gallery.

In these films, it’s the kind of clichéd twist that makes cast and audience alike question everything that came before it. "Where was the mistake made?" "Who screwed up?" Why didn’t they just…" (fill in the blank)?

We often hear how closely life imitates art, so if we hold that as true-ish, and we look through a more human lens, what if that exact moment isn’t the error, but the place where the work really begins?

Unless you happen to be a large crow, our journeys - in every sense of the word - rarely involve straight lines. We loop and return, we double back and scratch our heads, we second guess. A lot.

So if we are comfortable with that premise, we can perhaps hop-skip to state with some confidence that real change - circumstantial, personal, or emotional - cannot happen solely in a forward direction.

Sometimes we don’t go around in circles because we are lost, but because we are learning. Something we needed to experience hasn’t been seen clearly enough for us to leave it behind for good.

There is something deeply human about needing to revisit a place. Where we grew up; the final resting place of someone we loved deeply; anywhere life echoes our fleeting presence.

When we get the chance to stand in a familiar spot — or a happy place — we notice what we might have missed the first time, or perhaps what we misunderstood. What we weren’t ready to see. I had this experience only bloomin' yesterday... A place that I was so over... I had so moved on... which, as it happens, prompted me to write this piece. It brought up that quiet, marginally uncomfortable truth that many of us resist: you can’t properly move on from something until you have completed your understanding of it.

I know that sounds like the first law of geographical dynamics, but... Vanessa and I have been doing a few of these circles in the three-plus years we’ve been in France. Yesterday, we came back to a place both meaningful and familiar. Life, in her peculiar wisdom, brought us back - not to admonish us with unhelpful “should haves,” but to offer us one more look at a landscape both physically and emotionally very recognisable.

But here’s the thing…We came back to the same place, but not as the same people. And that, is the difference that changes everything. Because that big circle - that journey that sometimes feels like such a waste of time and effort - although it might look the same, is something else entirely. Our return - that shouty “Back To GO” moment on the Monopoly board of life, is done with more awareness. More sophisticated language. More space between us and the thing that once held us so tightly in its gravitational pull.

This, for me anyway, was a moment where I began to recognise completion. Not as a dramatic ending, spoken of as a total waste of time, but as something much quieter. A sense of knowing a little more about who I am becoming. And by the way...don’t expect there to be no internal discomfort, or an annoying inner voice telling you, “I thought you were over this…” I’m not sure you can ever silence that loud-mouth.

But for me, it was about standing in the same place and meeting it in a different way. With gratitude for the lessons it asked me to learn, and the frustrations I was asked to wade through - occasionally losing a welly.

That sense of completion doesn’t announce itself like a klaxon in a boat race, or arrive with post-performance applause. It simply feels as though a new path has opened.Not because the road ahead has changed.Because I have.

At Soulstice, this is how we trust that real movement begins.

Not in trying to become someone new — there is nothing wrong with the old you — but in allowing yourself the space to return fully and honestly to what has quietly waited for your attention.

Because when we allow ourselves to complete the circle, we don’t cry foul for time wasted. We don’t blame the map or its reader.

We move forward.Not because the path is different…but because we are.