I can see the start of my second journey taking shape. I’m back where I stated yet also not where I began. I’ve learned and grown from who I was the first time I engaged with this current and now I will see things I missed the first time. Like a path up a mountain, it’s a winding, circular path upwards, but unlike the easy road it’s up to us to pull ourselves up the mountain using what we learned. You could find yourself walking the circumference forever if you don’t use what you learned the last time to ratchet you up at each step. The first time I was ignorant and did not know what I was looking for, now I have a deeper understanding and a shape of what I’m looking for, what each lesson entails. I’ve learned how to avoid all those things that caught me up the first time but I’m sure new ones will be their in their place. All learning is remembering and so too all progress is backtracking while still moving forward. Life is cyclical, but that isn’t negative, rather it gives us a change to use what we learned. If you learn a lesson but never face that challenge again to prove you took the lesson to heart, have you even learned anything? Facing again that which we had vanquished is a chance to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Should we succeed, new challenges will rush up to meet us. So long as we are learning and growing, we can know we are alive. It’s when we stop, that we truly start dying. But as you go around again, you catch on to things you missed before. You grasp easily things that before eluded you. You discover secrets you didn’t see the first time; treasures tucked away in the cracks. The further we climb, the more we understand of the whole picture.