The Nonlinear Path of Unlearning
*Last updated 09/29/25
At the end of August, after a month-long trip through Europe, I came home and felt an unexpected wave of emotional withdrawal. It took me time to understand what was happening, and eventually I realized it had to do with all the stimulation of travel—the constant impressions, the heightened emotions, the way my mind tied everything to the idea of special. I wrote about that experience in another piece, The Lure of Special. Writing it helped me move through the heaviness and begin to feel better.
But while I was in the middle of that low, I kept asking myself: "Why do I feel so bad, when I thought I had made progress?" Over the years, I’ve been learning—and unlearning. Learning more about how my mind, emotions, and body work together; unlearning the patterns that keep me stuck. I’ve learned about how meanings can help me or make my life difficult. I’ve also learned that while I can’t stop using meanings altogether, I can loosen the grip of those that hurt me.
In fact, during this trip, before the crash came, I had experienced an important shift. I wrote about this new realization about meaning while I was still traveling, in an essay I called “Just a Place” and the Meaning of Special.
What follows is an essay within an essay: a piece written in the middle of the journey, a snapshot of insight before the withdrawal hit. It was because I had felt this progress so vividly that the fall afterward was harder. Still, I want to share it as it was, because it captures something true—something I still carry with me.
At the end of August, after a month-long trip through Europe, I came home and felt an unexpected wave of emotional withdrawal. It took me time to understand what was happening, and eventually I realized it had to do with all the stimulation of travel—the constant impressions, the heightened emotions, the way my mind tied everything to the idea of special. I wrote about that experience in another piece, The Lure of Special. Writing it helped me move through the heaviness and begin to feel better.
But while I was in the middle of that low, I kept asking myself: "Why do I feel so bad, when I thought I had made progress?" Over the years, I’ve been learning—and unlearning. Learning more about how my mind, emotions, and body work together; unlearning the patterns that keep me stuck. I’ve learned about how meanings can help me or make my life difficult. I’ve also learned that while I can’t stop using meanings altogether, I can loosen the grip of those that hurt me.
In fact, during this trip, before the crash came, I had experienced an important shift. I wrote about this new realization about meaning while I was still traveling, in an essay I called “Just a Place” and the Meaning of Special.
What follows is an essay within an essay: a piece written in the middle of the journey, a snapshot of insight before the withdrawal hit. It was because I had felt this progress so vividly that the fall afterward was harder. Still, I want to share it as it was, because it captures something true—something I still carry with me.
“Just a Place” and the Meaning of Special
I’m sitting in a children’s park in central London, listening to the wind rustling in the tall trees. At the playground, kids are playing, running, laughing. I feel relaxed—but part of me wonders: Am I enjoying this experience enough?
When I found out we were going to London, I was excited. It’s not my first time here, but still, London carries meaning. It’s London. You think Big Ben, the King and Queen, all the history, the museums, the accent. A special place. A place you’re supposed to feel something about.
But now that I’m here—at least in this moment—it’s just a park. The trees are beautiful and tall, but familiar. There’s a small football (soccer, if you’re American) field with a paved surface worn in places. The grass beneath the trees is patchy. The walls surrounding the park show their age. There is moss on the roofs, and cracks in the pavement where roots have pushed their way through, just like I’ve seen in so many places before. People are walking, standing, talking. I see a pile of bags, maybe garbage, in a far corner.
Yes, I am in London. But I’m also simply here, and it’s just a place.
Later that day, I have two hours to walk alone through downtown London. I notice that I am not experiencing it the way I used to feel in other so-called special places. I used to ask myself: Am I doing it right? Am I feeling it enough? Why am I not feeling more? There was often a pressure to match my internal experience with the imagined importance of the place.
But this time, something had shifted. Maybe because I’ve been thinking and writing so much about the nature of meanings, it finally settled in, quietly but clearly. This is just a place: people, streets, walls, trees, cars.
That’s one truth. But there’s another one alongside it, and I can hold them both, at least in this moment, without tension. It’s also a place full of meaning—at least to me. And it’s a place full of stories. Every building has a past. Every passerby carries a layered, intricate life. Every thing and every person holds its own thread of history. It’s ordinary and extraordinary at once—and I no longer feel the need to force one truth to cancel the other.
Part of what makes it extraordinary is the mystery woven through it all. Every passerby, wall, tree, and street holds something I’ll never fully grasp—hidden layers of memory and experience. There’s something quietly wondrous in the fact that the world is always more than what I see. Even in the most ordinary places, there’s an infinite hidden richness.
So now, as I’m walking through London, I don’t feel the need to resolve the tension between simplicity and depth, between it being “just a place” and the idea of its specialness in my head. I don’t have to grasp the full meaning of the city, or feel some particular emotion to justify being here. I can let the place be what it is—both ordinary and layered with unseen stories. I’m letting the crowd carry me—but I’m also choosing my own path. I’m just walking, looking, being. Noticing the familiar and the strange, the surface and the mystery, without trying to make one more real than the other.
And it is working. I’m enjoying it. The weather helps—it’s neither too hot nor too cold—and I feel comfortable in my clothes. That matters, too. But more than that, I notice a difference in myself. I’m still human—my brain still assigns meanings to everything around me and within me, automatically. And when I’m tired or anxious or overwhelmed, I still get pulled into those meanings, lose that spaciousness, get carried away. But more often now, when I feel grounded, I can take a step back and say, “Okay—this is just a meaning.” And that’s the shift: I don’t have to believe every interpretation that passes through my mind. I can watch it and let it be.
We chase things because we think they’re special. We want to go to London or Paris or New York, or get a particular job, or fall in love, or buy a home—not just because of what they are, but because of what they mean. And those meanings live in our heads.
London is not just a city—it’s a symbol. So is “falling in love,” or “being successful,” or “finding your calling.” The things themselves are just… things. Cities are made of buildings and roads and public parks. Jobs are made of tasks and emails. Even relationships are made of conversations and compromises and moments that are sometimes magical, and sometimes just laundry.
That’s not a bad thing. Meanings give color to life. But they can also create pressure. When we expect something to be special, we worry about doing it right. I’ve caught myself in that loop many times: Am I enjoying this park or this walk in London the way I’m supposed to? Should I be doing something more exciting, more impressive?
And then, the moment comes when the reality doesn’t quite match the meaning we imagined. And we feel a little let down, though we might not know why.
Sometimes we don’t even notice it consciously—we just move on to the next goal or experience. But if we look closely, we might see the pattern. We build up an idea in our heads, we get there, and then we realize: Oh. It’s just a park. Just a job. Just a person. Just a moment.
But “just” doesn’t mean bad. It means real. And real is beautiful.
We don’t have to run after things simply because they’ve been marked as important by someone else—or even by ourselves, in the past. We can let go of the pressure to make every moment mean something big. We can just live it. And in that letting go, something opens: we become available to the present. To what is actually here. Not the idea of the moment, but the moment itself.
That being said, there’s still pleasure in believing that some things are special. There’s joy in the stories we tell ourselves, in the chase, in the way the mind spins with anticipation and longing. There’s a kind of magic in imagining that something extraordinary is just around the corner.
If everything is “just a thing,” what do we aim for? What gives life its sparkle?
But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the sparkle isn’t something we have to add—it’s what we uncover when we stop trying to name everything, categorize everything, rank everything. Maybe the shimmer is already there, hidden beneath our mental labels.
What helped me most on that walk through London was not needing to decide. I didn’t have to resolve whether the city was ordinary or extraordinary. It was both. And when I stopped trying to split the world into “just” and “special,” I could actually be with it, fully.
I’m sitting in a children’s park in central London, listening to the wind rustling in the tall trees. At the playground, kids are playing, running, laughing. I feel relaxed—but part of me wonders: Am I enjoying this experience enough?
When I found out we were going to London, I was excited. It’s not my first time here, but still, London carries meaning. It’s London. You think Big Ben, the King and Queen, all the history, the museums, the accent. A special place. A place you’re supposed to feel something about.
But now that I’m here—at least in this moment—it’s just a park. The trees are beautiful and tall, but familiar. There’s a small football (soccer, if you’re American) field with a paved surface worn in places. The grass beneath the trees is patchy. The walls surrounding the park show their age. There is moss on the roofs, and cracks in the pavement where roots have pushed their way through, just like I’ve seen in so many places before. People are walking, standing, talking. I see a pile of bags, maybe garbage, in a far corner.
Yes, I am in London. But I’m also simply here, and it’s just a place.
Later that day, I have two hours to walk alone through downtown London. I notice that I am not experiencing it the way I used to feel in other so-called special places. I used to ask myself: Am I doing it right? Am I feeling it enough? Why am I not feeling more? There was often a pressure to match my internal experience with the imagined importance of the place.
But this time, something had shifted. Maybe because I’ve been thinking and writing so much about the nature of meanings, it finally settled in, quietly but clearly. This is just a place: people, streets, walls, trees, cars.
That’s one truth. But there’s another one alongside it, and I can hold them both, at least in this moment, without tension. It’s also a place full of meaning—at least to me. And it’s a place full of stories. Every building has a past. Every passerby carries a layered, intricate life. Every thing and every person holds its own thread of history. It’s ordinary and extraordinary at once—and I no longer feel the need to force one truth to cancel the other.
Part of what makes it extraordinary is the mystery woven through it all. Every passerby, wall, tree, and street holds something I’ll never fully grasp—hidden layers of memory and experience. There’s something quietly wondrous in the fact that the world is always more than what I see. Even in the most ordinary places, there’s an infinite hidden richness.
So now, as I’m walking through London, I don’t feel the need to resolve the tension between simplicity and depth, between it being “just a place” and the idea of its specialness in my head. I don’t have to grasp the full meaning of the city, or feel some particular emotion to justify being here. I can let the place be what it is—both ordinary and layered with unseen stories. I’m letting the crowd carry me—but I’m also choosing my own path. I’m just walking, looking, being. Noticing the familiar and the strange, the surface and the mystery, without trying to make one more real than the other.
And it is working. I’m enjoying it. The weather helps—it’s neither too hot nor too cold—and I feel comfortable in my clothes. That matters, too. But more than that, I notice a difference in myself. I’m still human—my brain still assigns meanings to everything around me and within me, automatically. And when I’m tired or anxious or overwhelmed, I still get pulled into those meanings, lose that spaciousness, get carried away. But more often now, when I feel grounded, I can take a step back and say, “Okay—this is just a meaning.” And that’s the shift: I don’t have to believe every interpretation that passes through my mind. I can watch it and let it be.
We chase things because we think they’re special. We want to go to London or Paris or New York, or get a particular job, or fall in love, or buy a home—not just because of what they are, but because of what they mean. And those meanings live in our heads.
London is not just a city—it’s a symbol. So is “falling in love,” or “being successful,” or “finding your calling.” The things themselves are just… things. Cities are made of buildings and roads and public parks. Jobs are made of tasks and emails. Even relationships are made of conversations and compromises and moments that are sometimes magical, and sometimes just laundry.
That’s not a bad thing. Meanings give color to life. But they can also create pressure. When we expect something to be special, we worry about doing it right. I’ve caught myself in that loop many times: Am I enjoying this park or this walk in London the way I’m supposed to? Should I be doing something more exciting, more impressive?
And then, the moment comes when the reality doesn’t quite match the meaning we imagined. And we feel a little let down, though we might not know why.
Sometimes we don’t even notice it consciously—we just move on to the next goal or experience. But if we look closely, we might see the pattern. We build up an idea in our heads, we get there, and then we realize: Oh. It’s just a park. Just a job. Just a person. Just a moment.
But “just” doesn’t mean bad. It means real. And real is beautiful.
We don’t have to run after things simply because they’ve been marked as important by someone else—or even by ourselves, in the past. We can let go of the pressure to make every moment mean something big. We can just live it. And in that letting go, something opens: we become available to the present. To what is actually here. Not the idea of the moment, but the moment itself.
That being said, there’s still pleasure in believing that some things are special. There’s joy in the stories we tell ourselves, in the chase, in the way the mind spins with anticipation and longing. There’s a kind of magic in imagining that something extraordinary is just around the corner.
If everything is “just a thing,” what do we aim for? What gives life its sparkle?
But maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the sparkle isn’t something we have to add—it’s what we uncover when we stop trying to name everything, categorize everything, rank everything. Maybe the shimmer is already there, hidden beneath our mental labels.
What helped me most on that walk through London was not needing to decide. I didn’t have to resolve whether the city was ordinary or extraordinary. It was both. And when I stopped trying to split the world into “just” and “special,” I could actually be with it, fully.
Image credit: NASA
The Power of Unlearning
Now, after reading the essay I wrote during the trip, you can see why coming home felt so frustrating. I knew the realization was real—I had experienced it. It was an exciting shift. And yet, when I came home, I fell into an emotional withdrawal. At first, I thought it meant I had lost everything I’d gained—that Chicago and my home no longer felt special, while Europe still did. But as I wrote and reflected, I began to see it differently. The joy I felt abroad wasn’t only because the places were “special.” It was also because I was more present, more attentive, less trapped by the question of whether I was doing it right. That insight still matters. The setback didn’t erase it. What it reminded me instead is that learning and unlearning are never linear. Progress is real, but it doesn’t always feel steady. And that realization led me back to a theme I keep returning to: the quiet power of unlearning.
Much of what we call “growth” in therapy, contemplative practice, or even spiritual awakening can be understood as this kind of unlearning. Neuroscience and psychology describe how the brain forms pathways—defaults shaped by temperament, history, culture, and repeated experience. Buddhism, too, speaks of conditioned perceptions and attachments that shape suffering. These are the grooves into which attention, emotion, and behavior so often fall without our awareness.
To see these grooves is already an act of power. To question them is another. But the deeper power may be in staying present through the nonlinearity of the process. Unlearning does not unfold in straight lines. It stretches, recoils, and resists. A useful image might be a rubber band: you pull it outward—toward insight, toward openness—and then it snaps back with surprising force. As Jack Kornfield describes in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, even profound spiritual breakthroughs are often followed by long periods of re-entanglement in old habits of fear, reactivity, or despair.
But even the recoil is part of the movement. Each return to old patterns is slightly altered by what has already been seen. Like the universe itself—expanding, maybe contracting, cycling through vast rhythms—we, too, expand and contract in our inner lives. What matters is not avoiding the regression but noticing that the “snapback” lands somewhere new. The old pattern returns, but we are less convinced by it. Less ruled by it. This, too, is power.
It’s a power that unfolds in the quietest of moments: pausing before a familiar reaction; softening around a painful thought; witnessing meaning arise and dissolve. It’s not dramatic. It rarely announces itself. But it’s what makes lasting transformation possible.
The imagery of the mind as a universe—expanding and contracting, stretching like a rubber band—stayed with me. I wanted to follow it further, to see what might emerge if it were shaped into something more poetic. For this, I worked with ChatGPT, creating the poem that follows in a collaborative way. Normally, I write my poems entirely on my own, but here the process itself felt like part of the exploration, so the poem became a joint creation. I want to finish my essay with this poem, as this is one of the deepest realizations that has stayed with me after my trip. Because it gives me hope that, even in the darkest moments, I can still be moving towards the light.
Unlearning moves like this:
A rubber band pulled outward,
quivering with possibility,
straining against the habits of years.
Then--
a snap,
a recoil,
a return to familiar ground.
But each return is different.
The band, stretched and released a thousand times,
never rests in quite the same place.
The cosmos, swelling with galaxies,
never contracts to its original shape.
The path is not a straight line,
not a clean ascent from darkness to light.
It is a rhythm--
stretch and yield,
expand and fold,
like breath,
like tides,
like the slow pulse of a star.
And in this rhythm,
power is not in holding the stretch forever,
but in stretching again,
and again,
trusting that each recoil
lands you in a wider sky.
Now, after reading the essay I wrote during the trip, you can see why coming home felt so frustrating. I knew the realization was real—I had experienced it. It was an exciting shift. And yet, when I came home, I fell into an emotional withdrawal. At first, I thought it meant I had lost everything I’d gained—that Chicago and my home no longer felt special, while Europe still did. But as I wrote and reflected, I began to see it differently. The joy I felt abroad wasn’t only because the places were “special.” It was also because I was more present, more attentive, less trapped by the question of whether I was doing it right. That insight still matters. The setback didn’t erase it. What it reminded me instead is that learning and unlearning are never linear. Progress is real, but it doesn’t always feel steady. And that realization led me back to a theme I keep returning to: the quiet power of unlearning.
Much of what we call “growth” in therapy, contemplative practice, or even spiritual awakening can be understood as this kind of unlearning. Neuroscience and psychology describe how the brain forms pathways—defaults shaped by temperament, history, culture, and repeated experience. Buddhism, too, speaks of conditioned perceptions and attachments that shape suffering. These are the grooves into which attention, emotion, and behavior so often fall without our awareness.
To see these grooves is already an act of power. To question them is another. But the deeper power may be in staying present through the nonlinearity of the process. Unlearning does not unfold in straight lines. It stretches, recoils, and resists. A useful image might be a rubber band: you pull it outward—toward insight, toward openness—and then it snaps back with surprising force. As Jack Kornfield describes in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, even profound spiritual breakthroughs are often followed by long periods of re-entanglement in old habits of fear, reactivity, or despair.
But even the recoil is part of the movement. Each return to old patterns is slightly altered by what has already been seen. Like the universe itself—expanding, maybe contracting, cycling through vast rhythms—we, too, expand and contract in our inner lives. What matters is not avoiding the regression but noticing that the “snapback” lands somewhere new. The old pattern returns, but we are less convinced by it. Less ruled by it. This, too, is power.
It’s a power that unfolds in the quietest of moments: pausing before a familiar reaction; softening around a painful thought; witnessing meaning arise and dissolve. It’s not dramatic. It rarely announces itself. But it’s what makes lasting transformation possible.
The imagery of the mind as a universe—expanding and contracting, stretching like a rubber band—stayed with me. I wanted to follow it further, to see what might emerge if it were shaped into something more poetic. For this, I worked with ChatGPT, creating the poem that follows in a collaborative way. Normally, I write my poems entirely on my own, but here the process itself felt like part of the exploration, so the poem became a joint creation. I want to finish my essay with this poem, as this is one of the deepest realizations that has stayed with me after my trip. Because it gives me hope that, even in the darkest moments, I can still be moving towards the light.
Unlearning moves like this:
A rubber band pulled outward,
quivering with possibility,
straining against the habits of years.
Then--
a snap,
a recoil,
a return to familiar ground.
But each return is different.
The band, stretched and released a thousand times,
never rests in quite the same place.
The cosmos, swelling with galaxies,
never contracts to its original shape.
The path is not a straight line,
not a clean ascent from darkness to light.
It is a rhythm--
stretch and yield,
expand and fold,
like breath,
like tides,
like the slow pulse of a star.
And in this rhythm,
power is not in holding the stretch forever,
but in stretching again,
and again,
trusting that each recoil
lands you in a wider sky.