Transformation Isn’t Linear

Hustle culture, good vibes culture, and mastery culture all keep selling the fantasy of a final transformation. Once you’ve checked the boxes: healed your trauma, decluttered your closet, forgiven your father, and Marie Kondo’d your garage — you’ll be done. Ta-da! Transformed forever.

Except that’s not how deep Soul work actually happens. Stuckness, despair, breakdown, these aren’t glitches in the system. They are the system. The delicate, interwoven building and tearing down of Psyche doesn’t predictably move along a chronological line; it moves in spirals.

Healing is cyclical. Transformation is not a one-time Everest summit. It’s a mulberry bush we keep circling (yes, in this analogy, ego is the monkey and soul is the weasel). We may think each lap brings us back around to the same old themes, but every circumambulation gets deeper, darker, or sometimes just weirder.

Like the time I dreamt C.G. Jung was riding a unicycle. I mean, what the hell was that?

It is natural that those spirals sometimes come with depression, with a heaviness that makes you wonder if you’ll ever climb out. Our culture rushes to slap an antidepressant on it, to medicate away the liminality. And while I don’t want to look down my nose at those things, too often, what we are trying to medicate is our Soul trying to move things along.

I’m not saying don’t get help. I’m saying maybe you don’t need a cure so much as, oh, I don’t know, a sabbatical? Or hell, a season of rage-against-the-system disillusionment on a llama farm in Kentucky. We don’t need more antidotes; we need a place to sit in the discomfort long enough to pay deeper attention to the movements of the Soul.

Stopwatch vs. Soulwatch

Which brings me to the subject of time. Which, I know, sounds like a late-night dorm-room conversation with your stoner roommates after watching Donny Darko for the 5th time (“What even is time, bro?”). But hear me out. By 25, you’re supposed to have a career. By 30, a house. By 40, kids. By 50, a divorce and a boat. By 60, a second career or at least a dog that wears sweaters.

We live by what the Greeks called Chronos time. This is clock time, sequential time, the straight-line march of deadlines and quarterly earnings reports. Chronos is what makes us panic when we feel “behind.” It’s the ticking time bomb behind every midlife crisis. Philosophers sometimes call it “profane time.” It’s ordinary, linear, ticking forward whether you like it or not, and as you probably guessed, it’s married to ego-consciousness. Ego has an ongoing love affair with charts, calendars, and control. In our culture, Chronos often becomes oppressive: we compare ourselves against arbitrary timelines, panic about being behind, or use it to measure success.

But the Greeks also gave us another kind of time. Oh yes, Chronos has a wild twin, less stopwatch, more thunderbolt: Kairos. Chronos handles the permits; Kairos puts on the fireworks show. Which is exactly what happened to my client, Jerry.

Jerry ran his life like a well-oiled spreadsheet. His kids were signed up for all the right sports and civic organizations. He and his wife made an appearance at every nonprofit banquet and charity golf tournament. In their small town, he was respected, solid, the accountant you trusted with your taxes and maybe your secrets.

He found me when the spreadsheet stopped balancing. His wife was having an affair. He came in outraged, broken, and sad. She had no reason to betray him, he insisted. He had provided, coached their boys’ baseball team, paid the mortgage, attended every Rotary meeting. But the truth was, she was sick of the small-town conveyor belt. She wanted more than weekends at the lake cabin and Norman Rockwell Christmas cards. She used to tease him, “All the world’s a stage,” but Jerry never caught the subtext: she wanted a different role. When she finally left for a man with more Soul than savings bonds, the whole thing exploded.

The divorce was brutal. His high school sons, the boys he’d pitched batting practice to for years, shocked him by siding with their mother. His business faltered in the shadow of scandal. His friends stopped calling. He lost his family, his career, his place in the community in one fell swoop.

In Jerry’s mind, it wasn’t fair. He had done everything “right.” Checked all the boxes. Played by the rules. Done it all in the correct order according to the great American playbook. And life stabbed him in the back.

But slowly, something cracked open. The first hint was the silence. With the house empty, the calendar no longer jammed, he didn’t know what to do with the hours. So he sat on his porch, at first out of sheer paralysis. When he came to see me during these weeks, he was terrified, sleep-deprived, and just wanted me to tell him what tasks to fill the spreadsheet with to distract him from the quiet.

It was tough when I broke the news that I couldn’t fix it. However, my suggestion that he start by just watching the sun rise in the morning without checking his phone landed. To his great (and my quiet) surprise, he found himself staying for the sunsets as well. He noticed the sound of owls at night, the way the air shifted before rain. He admitted, sheepishly, that for the first time in his life, he could actually feel his own heartbeat.

His allegiance to Chronos had gutted him, stripped him bare. But in that empty space, Kairos crept in, with Soul as a sidekick. At first, they hit him with a roundhouse to the face, but as time went on, and Jerry made space for the quiet, Soul spoke with a whisper instead. Her gentle proddings woke up something tender inside him; a true honor for me to watch unfold.

He started painting again, something he hadn’t done since college. He began walking the river trail every morning, not to exercise or pheasant hunt, but to see which wildflowers were blooming. He learned to cook. Not fast, Midwest casseroles for potlucks, but long, slow meals just for himself. And then, much to the shock of himself as well as the small town criers, Jerry fell in love again. Not with another checklist life, but with someone who wanted to sit barefoot with him on the porch, drink wine, and talk about his paintings. His boys graduated from high school and started coming around again because the former drill sergeant Dad had softened into the kind of human they actually wanted to throw a ball around with.

Jerry will still say the divorce nearly killed him. But he’ll also say it saved him. The only way he was going to stop confusing “life plan” with “actual life” was by losing everything he thought mattered. As a result, he stumbled into what actually does. And spoiler alert: it sure as hell wasn’t the tidy chronology of married by 30, kids by 40, Social Security at 62 ½, Medicare at 65.

Chronos Ticks, Kairos Strikes

Chronos is your body’s molting season: predictable, cyclical, nature’s version of a calendar reminder. Soul doesn’t nicely obey Chronos. It hangs out with Kairos, the Greek word for sacred time, “the opportune moment,” the ripeness of the season. As opposed to quantitative time, it’s qualitative time. Not how long something takes, or whether the annual molt is here, but whether the moment is ripe, charged, numinous. In theology, Kairos is considered the eternal breaking into the material plane of time. God’s timing rather than human schedules. Liberation theologians call them “Kairos moments” when history was ripe for upheaval and the air was electric with reformation energy.

Feels a little familiar right now, eh?

Within Depth Psychology, Kairos aligns with the unconscious surfacing, in the “right moment” through symbols, dreams, or synchronicities. The instant the shell cracks, it’s not the clock that decides when to hatch. It’s the moment the chick says, “I’m done in here,” and busts through into the light. Kairos is the feeling you get when the universe cracks open for just a second and you know it’s time to leap. It’s the moment a conversation, a dream, a death, or a song arrives and you think, “Oh shit, I sense a disturbance in the force, Luke.”

And then you wake up at 2:30am and already know that your mom died before the phone even rings.

If Chronos is your biological clock ticking in the doctor’s office, then Kairos is the sudden rupture in the fabric of your plans. Moments when the air thickens, your body hunkers down, and you know you’ll never be the same. Obviously, we need both; otherwise, nobody would pay their taxes or pick their kids up from school on time (guilty…but hey, sometimes that conversation with the clerk at Trader Joe’s is Soul-led).

Chronos is especially useful when we’re young. It gives us structure, a way to learn, grow, and meet the expectations of a world that insists on calendars and due dates. The New York Times columnist David Brooks once framed this as the difference between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues. When we are young, we are still building up our résumé virtues. These are Chronos-driven: the skills, achievements, and bullet points we can measure, schedule, and put on LinkedIn.

Eulogy virtues, on the other hand, are the qualities people actually remember when we’re gone: kindness, presence, courage, love. The danger, of course, is that we can spend an entire life chasing résumé virtues, only to realize too late that Soul was after the eulogy virtues all along.

Often, as we mature, Kairos starts nudging us. We begin to notice people who have a magnetism that draws us in, new interests that don’t align with our career goals. Things that make no logical sense, and yet we can’t resist them. When logic fails us, we often realize that Soul is in the driver’s seat.

The trouble is, most of us get stuck overvaluing Chronos, chasing deadlines until life blurs by so quickly we forget to actually live it. What we need isn’t to abolish one for the other, but to find a better rhythm between them: enough Chronos to keep us fed and clothed, enough Kairos to keep us awake, present, and cracked open to mystery.

Camels, lions, and children, oh my

Joseph Campbell tells one of my favorite stories about transformation in his now iconic interview with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth. It is from Nietzsche’s prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which characterizes three transformations of the human spirit.

When you’re young, you start life as a Camel. You kneel down and say, “Pile it on.” Family, teachers, religion, Pinterest boards, all of it gets strapped onto your back. The Camel stage is about obedience, about letting the world hand you its rulebook so you can survive inside its system. It’s exhausting, but necessary. You gotta learn the alphabet before you can write poetry.

But eventually, the Camel staggers into the desert and has its second transformation: a Lion. The Lion’s task is to slay a dragon whose scales all glitter with the same phrase: “Thou Shalt.” Every scale is a commandment, some as ancient as scripture, others as stupid as yesterday’s corporate HR memo.

Thou shalt major in business, not art. Thou shalt get married before 30. Thou shalt not quit your soul-sucking job because you need health insurance.

The Lion doesn’t negotiate with this dragon; it roars, it resists, it tears the whole “should” system to shreds.

And then, once the dragon is slain, the Lion undergoes its third and final transformation, something even stranger: a Child. Not childish, but child-like: innocent, dynamic, rolling forward “like a wheel out of its own center,” as Nietzsche put it. You’ve absorbed the culture, carried the rules, and slain them, so now you’re free to play, create, and live from your own depths. Not naïve, but renewed.

And then you start the whole damn thing over again.

This is the same rhythm that runs through art, through vocation, through soul work. First, you submit to the rules. Then you rebel against them. Then, finally, you embody them so deeply you can throw them off and start creating from your own center. It’s the spiral you travel until you realize the real point was neither obedience nor rebellion but the strange freedom that comes when you’ve lived through all of it and relaxed into innocent curiosity about the whole, wild process.

Campbell liked to tag his commentary on becoming with his famous line: “Follow your bliss.” Which is basically another way of saying: stop obsessing over the correct way to exfoliate dragon scales and start paying attention to Soul nudges. The famous channeler of Bashar, Darryl Anka reminds humanity that the only assignment is to follow our deepest passion… to the end of where it leads us…with no expectation of the outcome.

When we manage this delicate balance, it is nothing short of magical.

You have never been on a treadmill. It has always been a spiral. Welcome to the mulberry bush of Soul. Every lap gets deeper, every molt grows back fuller, every year you get closer to wholeness.