You know the expression “running in circles?” It is a way of expressing a fruitless effort or expending a lot of energy but accomplishing nothing. When you run in circles, you end up exactly where you start. The idiom ‘spinning your wheels’ means the same thing. When you spin your wheels you are wasting your effort to no avail.
We all equate running to making a good choice to keep fit, but certainly running in circles is not a pattern we should allow in our lives if we want a productive life. Running in circles does nothing for our emotional health and can potentially create high levels of stress. Inevitably we occasionally have those experiences where we have “run in circles” or “spun our wheels” but hopefully we learn from them and find ways to avoid them.
Years ago I had an experience that was certainly a classic tale of running in circles, but this time it was “driving in circles.” As a busy mom of five and entrepreneur engaged in multiple businesses, I was always in high gear to keep with the demands of an active life. One night when things had settled down I decided to get ahead of the game for the next day and mow our large lawn. The riding mower had lights, and once I was lulled to the hum of the mower I found it was a productive time where I could think, strategize and unwind. I have no idea why I did not wait to have one of our kids mow the lawn.
It took an hour and a half on the riding mower to get over the entire lawn. Trimming was to be done with the push mower in the light of day by someone else. I finally made it around the lawn in the pleasant summer evening although it was dark from the beginning of the task.
When I finally stopped the mower I was appalled to discover I had never lowered the blade! For one and a half hours I simply had a ride on the mower in one circle after another, after another without cutting a blade of grass! I do not remember if I laughed or cried, but I learned a powerful lesson from this experience as years later I still relate to it.
If I had slowed myself down long enough to be certain the details were in place and had paused for a second to catch my breath I might have discovered my error in the beginning. Certainly with one quick motion of the hand, the blade would have been engaged and the project would have been completed. No blade, no accomplishment.
This week I have purposely slowed the pace of my work as an experiment to see if I could accomplish the same amount of work without being in high gear. I am guessing that I have. A classic multi-tasker, I have concentrated on doing one project at a time from start to finish, whereas it is my internal nature to keep a lot of balls in the air at once. I always finish the projects, but often am working on several at a time. The experiment this week was to complete one task at a time.
Rather than beat ourselves up when we realize we have been running in circles, we can allow that to be a lesson to us. Usually it means we just need to slow down and make certain “the blade is engaged”. Activity should never be equated to accomplishment.
Emotional fitness is essential for a happy life. When we accomplish, we feel good. When we feel good, we strengthen our emotional fitness and feed off of those successes for future accomplishments.
We all know that he who runs in circles never gets far.