The Slinky

The slinky is a wonderful analogy for how the life of a business or a person happens. It begins, physically, with one coil, spirals on for a maximum length and then ends, with each coil representing various events in our life or each coil representing a “change” in our life. Each coil representing a dialogue, insight, action, reflection, and moving to the next based on the dialogue that occurs from the reflection. Each coil representing a decision, a choice, based on the preceding coils and the impact of other slinkys that come into contact with our life/slinky. A slinky, like our life has a beginning and an end and anchoring the slinky helps to prevent kinks in, or misdirection of, the slinky much the same as a vision, purpose, or values provides us with a direction that helps us to make choices in our life. Naturally, we never know what the impact of other slinkys or events on our life are going to be or how long our slinky/life happens to be. Most of us want to think of the events in our life as separate and distinct unto themselves. That we can “fix” a link and move on as if nothing has happened and most of us know that this is not true, but we really want it to be and so some of us live as if it is true. I like to think that in acknowledging that there is an end to my slinky that I can, in some way, help anchor my slinky with a direction and that by having a vision or purpose I will more likely do things to avoid kinks or a break in my slinky and it will be able to function right up to the end.

An aside on slinkys occurred to me was that our life/slinky has multiple additional slinkys that spin off of each event/link, connections to other people and other aspects of our life. Many times we impact other people without even knowing it by a word or action that creates ripples along the multiple slinkys that make up this existence. Kind of starts to take on the visual appearance of a fractal depiction in my mind and makes us realize that our actions do not only effect us, they effect others in multiple ways that we most likely will never know or understand.