Consider the Spiral

Spirals occur in nature (like the DNA molecule) and artificially (like a spiral staircase). There is an efficiency to spirals: one comes back around to where one has been before, but at another level -- perhaps with added height or perspective. Repetition is not recursion, but amplification: a spiral can expand the circumference of its circling, like a spiral galaxy.

I'm drawn to the spiral as a powerful metaphor because it is a model for iteration, and I am an advocate of iteration for learning and for developing meaningful content or projects.

I also like the spiral as a metaphor because it is a way of combining linear concepts (such as progress) with circular concepts (such as wholeness or eternity). Whenever I hear those water metaphors for the digital age ("surfing" the web, or the "drinking from the fire hose" of information) -- I like to substitute the spiral metaphor. It goes somewhere by circling back. And circling back is exactly what we often need to do if we are ever to move forward.


If one is consumed with consuming information or media, this usually means dealing with masses of items in a haphazard and superficial way. This can clog us, cognitively, not to mention deflate us with our sheer incapacity to register all that there is to see and learn.

This is why it is necessary to circle back, to review where one has been before, and to see it from the vantage point of further experience. This is why we should imitate the spiral in our learning or in our efforts to create something of value. And in the digital age, when we are always threatened with spectacle and novelty, we have to insist on pausing and reviewing so that we can collect our thoughts, calibrate our direction, and leverage what we observed or worked on in the past into something more substantial.

My spiral metaphor works well with the tiered content model that I've spoken of before: one moves from more frequent, superficial, and casual content to longer, more detailed, and formal content. What guides us in this path is social proof: we get a sense of what is worth developing (and obtain some motivation for doing so) as we bounce our ideas or share our preliminary content with others.

But we might also profitably get social proof of our current ideas from our past selves. Have I reread what I have written before? Have I reviewed my notes? Scanned my posts? Gone through the bookmarks and underlinings that I once used to indicate that something was worth returning to? Sometimes, we must return to an idea that we once had before, in order to give new birth to it in a renewed or expanded form.

What we often find upon such reflection and review is that many of our ideas lie inchoate, incipient, on the cusp of being something more important, but not yet fully formulated. I have discovered that a lot of good thinking has gone into blog posts that remain in draft form, never published. This is mostly due to my not fully developing those ideas, not wanting to hist the "post" button until my ideas were more securely, more thoroughly laid out.

But then I remember that the new knowledge paradigm brings value to openness, to knowledge-in-progress, to drafts and prototypes and provisional thinking. And so I'm getting up the courage to undraft those drafts, to push them out of the nest so that they can take flight or sink, but at least so they can have a life beyond the time-out of "maybe I'll publish you one day."

In addition to returning to our half-formed thoughts and creations, we need to go back and review our more complete successes. Certain blog posts that I've published I am very proud of (even if few or none have noticed them). I'm all for social proof, but I'm also for confirming to myself things that I stand for, or that have defined me or refined my thinking in ways that I'm pleased with. What are the posts or the content that you've published that you are most proud of? Can you spiral them upward, returning to them and amplifying them in some way?