On Life and the Seven Year Blip

As humans, every seven years we have a complete turnover of all of our cells. All of our old cells die and are replaced by replacement cells, genetically the same but a little different, older and aging, somewhat modified but still integral to the whole person.

This theory was something I heard at a time of crisis in my life. To use this paradigm as a template for all of life was easy to see and to understand.

If we are human then every seven years we would got through a new metamorphosis, the shedding of the old self and the acceptance of the new.

It makes sense then that everyone would go through something every so often that would aid them in this changing of the self. It could come in seven year increments or it could just happen in your life when you are ready for it.

No matter how good and easy our lives may be, every so often we go through something that shakes us up, sometimes shaking us to the core of our being. If we resist it, the healing process only takes longer. The way to healing is to go with the experiences and accept them as life experiences meant to bring us to the core of our being in order to gain new insights, new understanding, new direction, and ultimately fresh joy as we shed our old skin and put on a new one.

If life were a straight line on a graph, then the “7 Year Blip” would be that disturbance that jolts us into new cognizance of our human being, our life on this planet. Sometimes it might be a minor blip but often it is a major blip sort of like fibrulation equipment on a stopped heart where the shock causes the blip to restart the heart so the person can continue to live.

Robert Bly in his book, Iron John, talks of going down deep into the lake and coming up renewed. This theme is repeated in literature often, the act of diving deep into the self and surviving in spite of all of the motion to the contrary.

This year for me was a “7 Year Blip,” a series of events that have shaken me to my soul and left me amazed that I have survived and thrived.

I had to have my beloved shih-tzu, Toby Tyler put down because he had a ruptured disk in his neck and got to the point where he could not walk and was in tremendous pain. I have never cried over a pet like that little guy. He was such a charmer, his care of me as the Lady of the House and him in his role of The Protector of the Lady of the House. He was such a dear.