"The New Year is upon us. That familiar sense of returning to the same place: same resolutions, same hopes, maybe the same weight, job dissatisfaction, or relationship patterns you swore you'd address. For most people, this feels like failure. "I'm back here again" carries the weight of shame, as if returning to familiar struggles proves you've learned nothing. But the ancient Greeks understood something about returning that we've forgotten: Not all returns are the same."
"Kyklos (κύκλος) means circle or wheel: mindless repetition without progress. Think of a hamster in its wheel, or Sisyphus rolling his boulder. Repetition as imprisonment, going nowhere. Epistrophe (ἐπιστροφή) means "a turning toward" or "return with purpose." Conscious, intentional return enriched by experience. You come back to where you started, but you're not the same person who left. Heraclitus captured this: "You cannot step into the same river twice." The river is always flowing, always changing."
Ancient Greeks distinguished between kyklos—mindless circular repetition—and epistrophe—a purposeful return enriched by experience. Kyklos traps people in cycles of behavior; epistrophe transforms recurring situations into occasions for growth. Heraclitus' image of the river shows that both the world and the person change between visits, making return an opportunity for different outcomes. A Delphic maxim, 'Return with Wisdom' (Epistrophe meta Sophias), warns against constitutional stagnation and urges learning from repetition. New-year recurrences need not signal failure if they are understood as starts from accumulated wisdom rather than fresh beginnings. Asking what was learned converts shame into developmental opportunity.
Read at Psychology Today
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