Break the Pattern to Break the Pattern

I have been thinking about a line from The Bear.

Near the end of the series, Carmy repeats something his uncle Lee once told him: to break patterns, you have to break patterns. It is not a complicated thought. It is barely a sentence. But it landed in me and stayed there, and I have been turning it over ever since.

Because I think most of us are living inside patterns we never actually chose.

We are taught the shape of a life before we can question it

When we are children, the days are handed to us already assembled. Get up, go to school. It is Saturday, so we do the Saturday things. The structure arrives before we do. And there is nothing wrong with that — a child needs a shape to grow inside of.

But the shape outlasts the childhood. We carry the habit of the handed-down day into adulthood, where nobody is handing it to us anymore. We just keep the rhythm going because the rhythm is what we know. Our lives become habitual whether we intended them to or not.

And then there are the voices.

The people who love us when we are young share their thoughts openly. So do the people who love us when we are grown. They mean well, mostly. They tell us what they see, what they would do, what they think we are suited for. And if we give their voices and their viewpoints more weight than we give to our own — if their certainty gets to speak louder than our quieter inner knowing — we end up somewhere strange. We end up living a life that is not entirely our own.

It can look fine from the outside. It can be a good life by every measure anyone would use. And still, one morning, you wake up with the sense that you are not where you are meant to be.

I have come to understand that feeling as a signal. Not as failure, not as ingratitude. A signal. Something in me has noticed a pattern, and the noticing is the invitation to break it.

Ownership is the only door

Here is the part that is harder to sit with.

If I feel like I am not doing well at work, I cannot make it my work's fault. I have to own what I can change to make my work better, or I have to go find different work. If I am struggling in a relationship, I have to own what I am bringing to it and how I am showing up inside it, or nothing about it will move.

That is not the same as blame. Ownership and fault are two different things, and I think we confuse them constantly because both of them ask us to look at ourselves. But blame keeps us in the story. Ownership is the only thing that has ever gotten me out of one.

Because the truth underneath all of this is simple, and it took me a long time to accept it: the only power we have in life is the power over our own lives. And it is the one power we constantly give away without even realizing it. We hand it to circumstances. We hand it to other people's opinions of us. We hand it to the version of ourselves we agreed to be at twenty-three and never revisited.

Every time we hand it over, we also hand over the ability to change the thing we are unhappy about.

This is not about your life being bad

I want to be careful here, because I think this conversation gets flattened into something it is not.

Breaking a pattern does not mean your life is bad. I have always felt like there was goodness in my life, even during the seasons when my life was not good. I have looked at it through the lens of being blessed for as long as I can remember, and I still do. That has never been the question.

The question is whether there is an opportunity in front of me — right now, today — to break a pattern and do something intentional. Something that would make my life feel like it is being lived on purpose rather than by accident.

Because that is the actual risk. Not a bad life. An accidental one. A life that happened to you while you were busy keeping up with the rat race of living, and that you never once stopped to ask about. Is this the way I want the rest of my life to be?

Most of us do not ask. There is no natural moment for it. Nobody schedules it.

What I want

I want to change my stars. I want the freedom to do the things that bring me joy and not spend my one life hemmed in by things I have no power over anyway.

And the only way I know to bring that to life is to break the pattern. To do one thing differently, on purpose, and see what it opens.

It does not have to be dramatic. It can be as simple as changing your point of view.

But it does have to be yours.

— Em Orr

Change Your Stars is a journal of questions, coming soon. If you would like to know when it arrives, you can join the waitlist at changeyourstars.org.