Do It Again...and Again

“Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you’re not a gambling man
Then you find you’re back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand

You go back Jack do it again
Wheel turnin’ round and round
You go back Jack do it again”

–Do It Again, Steely Dan


“Do it again” - three of the toughest words in the English language. I hate redoing things. I just want everything that I do to be right the first time, and I want those around me to perform the same way. In the past I’ve equated having to do things again with failure. Could it be my expectations are flawed? Said another way, if we’re supposed to get things right the first time, why do we find ourselves doing the same things over, and over, and over…again?

Whether we want to admit it or not, repetition is comforting. There is a part of us that craves the familiar. That’s way we have choruses in music. Ever heard a song without a chorus? It’s hard for most to listen to. You can also see the affinity for repetition in children. Never make a silly face at a four-year-old unless you’re prepared to do it 100 times. And when you have had your fill and say, “OK, this is LAST TIME” and you do repeat the face, what do they say? “AGAIN!”

Repetition aids learning. Are you more apt to remember someone’s name you have only heard once, or one that you’ve heard 100 times? I bet you have had this experience – you listen to a song 1000 times, yet the next time you hear it, you hear something new. It strikes you in a new way. A new message is delivered, despite the content being unchanged. This exact phenomenon happened to me as I was preparing this blog. We don’t hear the whole message the first time we hear the message – ever. Information is always filtered through our minds, through what we’re dealing with in our lives at that moment. So what gets through to us changes each time we hear the message. Plainly said, we are slow to learn. Repetition provides us more opportunities to “get it” in new ways. As Cherie Carter-Scott wrote in her thought-provoking one-pager called “Ten Rules for Being Human”,

“You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, ‘life’. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.”

Not only do we naturally like repetition, the world is also designed around cycles. You can observe the presence of cycles in nature as the seasons pass. In addition, every religious tradition in history has its cycle of life and transformation – the Eastern traditions have the karmic wheel, the Christians embrace the cycle of birth, death, and resurrection, and the Jewish tradition tells of moving from bondage, to freedom, then back to exile.

Yet to answer my earlier question, “Why do we find ourselves trapped in seemingly endless cycles of repetition?” we need to go back to the Steely Dan song.

“Now you swear and kick and beg us / That you’re not a gambling man
Then you find you’re back in Vegas / With a handle in your hand”

This is the thing that hit me when preparing this message, even after hearing this song for decades. Do you see it? The slot machine in the song represents the karmic wheel, and our hero has been caught in a lie. And it’s not something he does consciously – he “finds himself” in Vegas with a handle in his hand, pulling it again, and again, and again, each time expecting a jackpot but only getting busted. He is out of integrity – he has said one thing and done another. So he’s on the treadmill. Again.

In my life, I left corporate life in 2005, vowing never to return. I told myself I was committed to finding my true calling regardless of the financial impact to my income. Almost a year later, I was still searching with very few answers and less income. But did I take the jobs offering me half (or less) of my corporate salary for the opportunity to do something “significant”? Nope. Instead, I ran back to my old company, returning to my old salary level, to do it all over again. I acted contrary to my words. The result? “Go back, Jack, do it again.”

So what do you do when you find yourself on the treadmill, stuck in a rut? First of all, relax and put away the self-torture devices. Give yourself some grace and simply notice what’s going on. Strive to become OK with doing things over, especially when you don’t see the point of it all. Sometimes repetition is necessary. We are programmed for it, it helps us learn, and sometimes it points out plainly when we are out of integrity. But it’s not necessarily a “bad” thing. It just is. We are in bondage when we fight against reality. True freedom lies in making new choices in the face of the same stimuli. As T.S. Eliot so eloquently put it, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Said another way by Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” And when you take the time to seriously consider what you may be missing or what you can learn from the present conundrum, that’s when you find the strength to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.