Should I Stay or Should I Go

On returning to the same decision until we are ready to release what no longer fits.

In 1981, the English punk band The Clash released a song titled Should I Stay or Should I Go, and while it was written in a very specific context, the question it asks has a way of echoing far beyond the moment in which it was created, showing up in places that are far quieter and far more personal than the song itself might suggest.

Because when you sit with it long enough, you begin to realize that this question is not confined to relationships or singular decisions.

It is a question that lives in all things.

Should I stay… or should I go?

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What I have come to understand is that this question does not arrive once and then disappear.

It returns.

Again and again.

And each time it returns, it brings with it a familiar feeling, even if the circumstances appear different, a kind of recognition in the body that says, you have been here before.

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I no longer experience time as a straight line.

Not because I reject the idea of progression, but because linear time does not fully explain why we encounter the same emotional and relational moments across different seasons of our lives, why we find ourselves standing in what feels like a new situation, only to realize that the internal experience is deeply familiar.

So I have begun to experience life as a series of returns.

Not arriving at something entirely new, but returning to something known, something that asks something of me again, but from a different place within myself.