Straight Lines or Circles: Capitalism vs the woman’s cycle
It all begins with an idea.
by Mara Livermore
Radicality is used to describe activities that are far reaching and thorough in the way they look at systems, and in the more political and activist sense to mean thoughts beliefs and activities that are considered extreme, outliers, things that challenge the norm.
Would you consider prioritising the wisdom and requirements of your cycle a radical act?
In a world that prioritises straight lines, is it radical to follow a circle?
Capitalism, and euro-centric values convince us to see the world in straight lines.
You career trajectory should plot a straight line upwards over time, it being most acceptable to deviate upwards, i.e. make leads and bounds in advancing in pay or responsibility or prestige. Tolerable, if you take a little dip if you can sell it as valuable in some way and basically going to get you further ahead than if you hadn’t taken it.
Our work and even hobbies should follow this straight line model. You should begin. Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. If you’re lucky, you might have some time inbetween this one and the next to recuperate or rebalance, but before the dust on one has settled, we’re already getting the “what’s next?” and being encouraged to move “onto the next thing”.
We also see this linear thinking in how we build our community and interactions. The myriad of “why is it so hard to make friends in our 30s” articles and pages of FB groups and reddit threads dedicated to helping people unweave the intricacies of 1 on 1 relationships demonstrates the issues that a 1 on 1 and transactional view of the world causes, when we’re meant to be building emotional webs, not highways.
Straight lines have us trying to squeeze a mythological perfection and completely insane level of satisfaction out of one or a handful of pretty individual relationships.
If we looked at all of this like we looked at our cycle, and with cyclical thinking, informed by the ancient methodologies, indigenous wisdom and spiritual advice that intrinsically recognises the cycles in everything from our cells that regenerate every 7 years to how water moves from ocean to sky to us to earth to ocean we’d feel less pressure to make every interaction perfect and trust the process of things.
We’d be freer in our careers as we move through different phases as we grow and evolve and gain wisdom. There’d be no shame in taking a “luteal” or shedding break - not just for kids or because of burnout but just, because.
We’d build into each project and activity and recuperation period. A retro at the end of each sprint, a break at the end of each project, a real winter each season to simply be and exist and live.
We’d put less pressure on a certain consistency and production in our friendships and give ourselves more space to have as many fleeting interactions as we need. We’d understand that what we give from a place of clarity and intent will come back to us, but most likely not directly from the person we are giving to. That who and what we resource can and should spread far and wide. A distant friend or unanswered message wouldn’t inspire feelings of personal attack, but invite us to check whether we might just be in different seasons.
On top of the intuitive and personal wisdom that listening to our cycles can provide - this wisdom can also help us rethink the way we build relationships and exist in society at large.