{"text":[[{"start":5.1,"text":"At the risk of sounding platitudinous: life can be horribly frustrating. You feel like you’re finally getting somewhere, and then you mess things up again (in the way you always do) and you’re right back at square one, stuck in your familiar, depressing rut. Round and round you go in the same old circle, never seeming to make any progress, until you finally lose that most precious of commodities: hope."}],[{"start":29.5,"text":"But consider this: what if you were going round and round, but in a way that is actually OK — normal, healthy, desirable, even? What if, despite all your cock-ups and self-chastisements, you were actually getting somewhere, just on a slightly more roundabout trajectory to the one you had imagined?"}],[{"start":47.75,"text":"We all know that you sometimes have to take “two steps forward, one step back”; that “Rome wasn’t built in a day”; that “progress doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigs and zags in fits and starts”, as President Barack Obama said just a decade ago (it now feels like a rather prescient remark). "}],[{"start":67.95,"text":"But we still imagine a line, even if it is not straight: up a bit, down a bit, up a bit further, down a bit further. The zigzag of progress can be good to remember. It enables us to zoom out and see the bigger picture — particularly helpful for things that tend to go up and down a bit. Your weight, your running pace, your stock portfolio. "}],[{"start":89.5,"text":"When it comes to other, less quantifiable areas of life, though, this line-graph visualisation starts to become less helpful. Sometimes it doesn’t feel as if there is any progress at all. Particularly when the thing you are trying to make headway on — treating yourself with kindness and compassion, for example, or avoiding dysfunctional coping patterns — is bound up in a deeply ingrained version of who you are. It can feel like the 50 emotional kilos you spent the past decade working so hard to shed have come back in an instant and now taunt you: “See, I know you couldn’t do it, you’re not getting anywhere, you’ll never change.” "}],[{"start":131.1,"text":"But this internal monologue may not reflect the truth. A therapist once told me that when I suddenly feel the nasty emotions I thought I had got rid of — or have the same unhelpful thoughts — I should see that as a reminder of how far I have come. Rather than panic about the feelings still being there, I should use this opportunity to observe them with more clarity, and to respond to them with more wisdom."}],[{"start":154.6,"text":"And this is where we get to a different kind of visualisation for personal progress. “Psychologically you develop in a spiral, you always come over the same point where you have been before,” explained the godfather of analytic psychology, Carl Jung, in 1929. “But it is never exactly the same, it is either above or below.” "}],[{"start":175.1,"text":"What Jung was saying is that it is not even possible for growth to occur without finding yourself back on the same emotional territory, repeating the same emotional patterns. What is possible is viewing them, and reflecting on them, from a different state of mind, as well as having a different response — ideally a more mature, wise and compassionate one."}],[{"start":196.75,"text":"Jung believed that the same emotional themes will keep turning up — particularly when we try to suppress them — until we are able to fully accept them. This was his idea of “individuation”: the life-long psychological process of integrating our conscious and unconscious minds in order to become our true selves and to reach our full potential. “There is no linear evolution,” he wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. “There is only a circumambulation of the self.” There’s the spiral again."}],[{"start":224,"text":"I have limited these reflections to personal progress, because when it comes to society as a whole things become even more complicated. Does technological progress assist societal progress? How do we achieve progress when some people’s idea of what that means is in direct conflict with that of others? Consider Voltaire’s idea that “history never repeats itself; man always does”: the image of returning again and again to the same ground can be applied at a wider level too. "}],[{"start":252.2,"text":"Perhaps, if we were able to accept the inevitability of circuitous progress in society too, we could get less depressed about the issues that keep coming up. It might enable us to be more pragmatic in our responses: the fact that we keep on revisiting the same arguments about immigration, inequality, taxes and identity need not preclude our having those arguments in a more sensible way."}],[{"start":274.95,"text":"Progress can be not only slow but also incredibly repetitive. Trust the process. And the next time you are spiralling, remember that spirals are not always a bad thing. "}],[{"start":292.40000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1779616803_5362.mp3"}