Most of us think that when we reach adulthood there’s nothing more to discover. We are so grown up that we have nowhere else to go but to maintain what we already know.

But life is more like a spiral, which draws us onward and upward, sometimes in ways we could never have foreseen. New discoveries and new challenges can lead us into situations that we couldn’t have imagined beforehand.

Right now, the economic challenges, the violence in the world, diseases we didn’t even know existed, have all become more real in ways no one could have predicted.

But as Rabbi Simon Jacobson explained a while back, the kabbalists describe this process as similar to the circular staircase. When we start to go up, we believe that we are going in the right direction. As we continue our climb, we come to a point where it feels like we have made no progress, because we find ourselves facing back to the way we came. However, the teaching reminds us to keep climbing toward our goal. As we continue we will eventually discover that we are facing the right way once again, and can successfully complete the mission we set out to accomplish.