Forces of Unfoldment

Rudolf Steiner, nineteenth-century “spiritual scientist,” theorized that human development unfolds in cycles of seven. He mapped humanity this way, in neat piles of seven, as well as the physical, mental, and emotional milestones he believed the average person meets as they move through these cycles. From birth to age seven, we develop the will to move our limbs and show our unabashed fascination with and gratitude for the world around us. From ages seven to fourteen, we learn how to learn and how to turn fascination and gratitude into love. By age twenty-one we ought to be able to separate our minds and bodies, to enjoy ideas the way children enjoy photos, to have messed up a few times in our raging quest for truth and meaning.

We expected to be emotional on the last night of our trip, the end of that summer in Ireland that brought us together: Larena, Kat, Phil, Zane, Maggie, Nicky, John, and me. To celebrate, we ordered a round of shots and took turns saying what we loved best about the trip, toasting each other. I was newly twenty-one, and we were all college kids on study abroad who hadn’t known such a beautiful place existed.

Some of us went to the same school and all of us lived in the same state, yet finding each other felt fateful. We were each so different, and being in a new place brought out parts of ourselves that hadn’t existed before. We were thankful to make friends who saved you a window seat on the bus, who watched and waited while you hiked a risky route over rocky cliffs.

When it was my turn to make a toast, I was thinking about John, about how we had no field trips left to trade off who packed lunch for the other, no more bus rides to share headphones and laugh quietly while everyone else slept. I loved them all, but meeting John felt like that moment of recognition, the relief when you’ve been lost and find your mom in the grocery store—Oh, there you are.

But I didn’t explicitly mention him, and then it was his turn. I held my breath, waiting for him to make a joke, to shy away from anything genuine, or to down his shot without any word at all. Instead, he thought for a moment, cleared his throat, then said he had assumed he’d come to Ireland and be alone the whole time. He said he was glad to be wrong—we listened to things his friends at home would never understand, and he never worried we were his friends only because we always had been.

We were stunned at our class clown’s sudden earnestness. I studied John because I always did, but now I searched and searched him for any trace of a joke. There wasn’t one. John wiped his eyes and looked up and around, his gaze stopping on me. I lifted my glass to signal our final toast, we said cheers, and then all the shots were gone.

Around age twenty-one, Steiner says, the average person should be thinking on their own and making decisions they won’t recognize as mistakes until later. Nearly fearless, with defeat as purely theoretical, we do not think of death at all. Indeed, the last thing I remember about my twenty-first birthday is being behind (or was I on top of?) the bar, pouring vodka into plastic cups. In the morning, I woke up with two bloody knees, no cell phone or keys or wallet, and friends who were angry with me for reasons my brain did not record. Asking my mother for help on a borrowed phone was not the proudest call I ever made, but that’s who I was then.

Steiner suggests to neither control nor suppress a person in this stage—they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do, and they’ll learn from the mess as they clean it up. Steiner calls these our “centaur years.” We’re half human and half beast, vacillating between logic and lust, between reason and wonder.

A few months after the trip, Phil cut off contact with all of us. He left every group message thread without explanation. When I texted What the hell, he was not hurtful but not apologetic.

If we all met at school, in class or something, we would never be friends, he said, and some of that stuff was messed up. Maggie and Zane both had serious relationships back home, and still, after each time they called their significant others, there they were holding hands again…

I stopped responding, angry that he was making valid points. Days later, he apologized and came back to our chat threads. I apologized too, for pretending he was wrong.

Because while Maggie and Zane were sharing the top bunk in our crowded hostel rooms, John and I were coy, quiet. He’d tiptoe into my bedroom and then back out. At breakfast the next morning, John would speak of his girlfriend at home as though she were his closest friend, the funniest and prettiest and smartest girl in the world. I believed him and had no intentions of hurting her, of interrupting her life. I didn’t know her. It seemed to me that she and John existed in one version of reality, and John and I existed in another.

When I confided in my friends from home, they reminded me that we all existed in the same version of reality. I said that I agreed—tiptoeing around with John was wrong, and it wouldn’t happen again.

Steiner notes that these cycles shouldn’t be taken as rules—every person will experience them, generally, but the age ranges are just theoretical. If you aren’t lining up with them, don’t worry; nobody is behind. My twenty-first birthday was the last night of its kind—or one of the last, anyway. I moved to a new city after college to work for free at a tiny publisher by day and serve South Carolina barbecue by night. I was turning my big ideas into reality, putting coolant in my car when it started smoking on the highway, and slowly but surely getting to where I was going. According to Steiner, the best (and only) way to make progress naturally is to do just that: progress naturally. No forcing anything, no way to get anywhere without taking one step and then another.

A year after the trip, we convened at Kat’s lake house over Labor Day. I was twenty-two and restless. After driving a ridiculous number of hours over two state lines, I arrived a day later than everyone else.

“It’s fun now that you’re here,” John said, our legs brushing under the water while we floated in the sun, away from the group.

“You weren’t having fun before?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“You’re my favorite and I’m your favorite. They know that,” he said.

We held each other’s floats so we wouldn’t drift apart, until the smell of dinner lured us out of the water. That evening we laughed, ate, and caught up. Everybody was doing well: Nicky had transferred schools to play baseball; Maggie and Zane were a few months into a real relationship together; Kat, Larena, and Phil were all applying to grad school; and John had just graduated and gotten a job. He and his girlfriend were still going strong too.

Eventually, everybody chose a bed, reunion adrenaline spent. I’d almost drifted to sleep when my phone dinged: One more on the dock? And though I knew I shouldn’t, I slid my shorts on and slipped out the back door. He was waiting on the porch. I grabbed the second beer from him, and he took my other hand. We walked wordlessly to the dock. It was second nature to let him wrap me up in his arms, to invite his lips on my neck as if no time had passed. We got in the lake and floated again, this time washed by moonlight, no floats or fabrics between our bodies.

“I think we only do this because it’s wrong,” I said into his shoulder.

“Maybe,” he said, “but if you were anybody else, I’d be able to walk away.”

Emboldened, I continued: “I want you all the time.”

At this, John stiffened. He said my name, his voice carrying something between sympathy and warning, then trailed off. The lake water felt suddenly freezing, infested—like we weren’t alone anymore. I untangled myself from him and lunged for the ladder.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, embarrassed, though I didn’t know what else I could have meant. When he said my name again, I was already dressed, already heading back inside to fall asleep in wet clothes, shivering.

The next cycle of development lasts until age twenty-eight and is labeled as “play that turns toward responsibility.” We become more rational creatures who control our emotions and actions. Steiner says that during this phase, our lens on life broadens as many begin to plant roots in relationships, careers, and parenthood.

During this time, I met Blaise, who changed my outlook on partnering up by proving it could be fun and fulfilling to be with somebody steady, careful, honest. I learned that turning the mirror back toward myself was uncomfortable, yes, but important now. I also learned how to stick to my word and how to say sorry, which I said often. Steiner says that in the middle of this stage, we become less selfish and curb our animal instincts in favor of a greater good. These years challenge us to separate fact from fantasy, to consider what it might take to morph from centaur into true human.

My local friends knew of my Ireland group, but I rarely mixed the two. We’d all moved after college, but it was also just simpler that way, allowing John and the others to remain in a separate box. Still, if I traveled near them, it felt wrong not to let them know. So when my friend Elly and I took a vacation to John’s hometown, I texted him to meet us at a bar. It was two years post-Ireland. We were twenty-three.

Come across the street instead, he replied. There’s karaoke.

We ventured to where he was and found him seated at the bar in a yellow T-shirt. He introduced us to a few of his friends. One of them quickly whisked Elly away to sing karaoke up onstage, and John and I were left alone. He had a drink waiting for me, and we sat side by side for hours, talking. He was with the same girlfriend, and I had my own relationship with Blaise. Still, John and I weren’t immune to memory.

“I just think about it a lot. Do you ever think about it?” I asked him—“it” being a synonym for “us”—and he said that he did, every day.

We talked about what it meant that we kept remembering and agreed that we didn’t know. We named the things we’d done together but couldn’t describe why we’d done them. I reached for his hand under the bar. He squeezed mine and then released it, resting his hand on my knee briefly before putting it back in his own lap. Elly returned then, arm in arm with John’s friend.

“We’re going down to the water after this song,” she said, giggly. “Wanna come?”

I did. I wanted us to leave our clothes in the sand and wade into the ocean and not worry about morning until it came, but John shook his head. When I asked if he was sure, he looked at me with something between sympathy and warning.

“Are you happy? With who you’re with?” he asked. I told him I was. I meant it.

“Good. We should leave it at that,” he said.

Then John called his ride home, and I called Blaise to say I was sorry, sorry, sorry.

“For holding his hand?” Blaise asked, and I said yes. It was the only tangible thing I’d done wrong.

“Well, it’s okay. You probably didn’t need to tell me that anyway,” Blaise said, then he stayed on the phone with me until I got home, and told me to get some sleep.

To stimulate a child’s imagination, Steiner recommends giving them tools to make their own doll instead of giving them a ready-made one. Encouraging children to fill in the blanks—to choose the hair, skin, facial expressions—helps with creativity and allows their world to be that much more fantastical. Steiner says that until age fourteen, children need to be given nearly everything “in the form of fairy tales, legends and stories in which everything is endowed with feeling.”

These cycles of seven are also known as “forces of unfoldment,” and they build on each other. You are your age and every other age you’ve been before. Adults may no longer need bright colors to understand, but we’re still built on a foundation of fantasy. Swiss literary theorist Max Lüthi notes that fairy tales “are unreal but they are not untrue.”

The next years passed in a blur, and suddenly I was twenty-six. My Ireland friends had sometimes met up in small groups, but nobody had seen John since a holiday party two years prior. He barely responded to our text thread, and I hadn’t heard from him directly since the night at the bar. Almost five years to the day since we’d left for Ireland, the group booked a secluded lake house to spend a weekend together. I thought John might not come, but he sent me his share of the money for the house.

The weekend sounded like a chorus of cans cracking open as we swam, floated, drank, and reminisced. Eight full plates. Eight chairs pulled up around the table. The same memories recounted from eight points of view. We wound down with the sun, and one by one, our other friends fell into bed. Waiting them out was John’s and my version of riding a bike—we never forgot how it worked.

The two of us had a lot to cover, starting with how, when, and why both of our long-term relationships had come to an end. I loved Blaise, but I didn’t see myself moving forward with him, and I knew I needed to do some things on my own. John said he’d ended his relationship for similar reasons.

“Plus, you really messed me up,” he said.

The walls within me started to rise up. It angered me that he was claiming to be the damaged one.

“I messed you up?” I asked. “You messed me up pretty bad too,” I said, suddenly wildly defensive of that more naive, infinitely hopeful younger version of me. “What was I supposed to do?”

“I know, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

We spent all night mapping where we’d been, marking our wrong turns, wondering if we could correct them, then months after that trying to find our way to someplace new. But it was like charting a path to Neverland—no realistic way to get there.

I was stirred not so much by the reality of John but by the hope of him. Like in gambling or daydreaming, we’re sustained by unreality in plenty of ways. I know now there was no such thing as me and John, much like we know there’s no such thing as leprechauns, unicorns, cottages made of candy. But if we take another step, lift another rock, open our eyes a bit wider, might there be? And if not, isn’t there enlightenment in the pursuit?

The cycle between twenty-one and twenty-eight fosters arguably the biggest change in our lives—our personalities, our goals, our needs. Most of the things we want look vastly different at the end than they did at the start. Close to the end of this phase in my life, I had a sense of calm in my chest that hadn’t been there before, borne from an intentional year of being quiet and listening to myself (and to the therapist I found after a series of panic attacks). I ended the relationship with Blaise, then I moved across the country for the master’s degree I’d always wanted. I learned, too, that one beer can be enough for the night and never had another night like my twenty-first birthday.

It’s not that I need a theory like Steiner’s to excuse my feelings or decisions, but it does help me explain them, especially to myself. When babies are cranky, we extend endless grace: they are tired, they are teething, they are brand new to the world and haven’t done any of this before. The same ought to be true for adults who used to be teenagers who used to be kids. Our older bodies inhabit our younger mindsets because we’re used to them; we rely on them while we wait to understand our new brain functions. It doesn’t mean we can claim ignorance in pursuit of absolute freedom, or that we need not ever apologize, just that there’s mercy in hindsight.

Steiner says that if they met, twenty-one-year-old you would see twenty-eight-year-old you as someone who doesn’t get it, while the older you would observe the younger one with endearment, wishing to pass on some wisdom. But there are some things you can’t understand until you stumble upon or earn the realization yourself. Bloody knees and all.

I am twenty-seven and visiting home from thousands of miles away. We gather for a holiday party at Zane’s house. Appetizers finished, we’re all drinking beer, except Maggie, who has gin like always. We’ve been linking arms and catching up, squealing over Kat’s engagement ring and scrolling through photos of Phil’s new house.

It is easy to be physically close to most of them. I lean into Zane when he puts an arm over my shoulder, plop myself into a tight spot between Kat and Larena, sit shoulder to shoulder with Phil while he shows me a dumb video on his phone. But John and I steer clear of each other. We say a polite hello upon arrival but are otherwise wary and aware of each other all night.

And eventually, pretending like I don’t want to talk to him, like I still have reason to be angry with him, tires me. The truth is, when I think of him from thousands of miles away, I hope he’s well. And watching him here with our friends, I remember he is still John: the boy who shared headphones and sandwiches with me, floated in the sunlight, the moonlight, who held my hand under the bar but knew when to let go; the man who is not that boy anymore but also is, who is still learning, changing, growing, trying.

I sit down at the other end of the couch where he’s sitting. He looks at me, unsure for a moment.

“What?” I say.

He leans over, reaches to move my hair, and tucks the tag back into my shirt.

“That’s been bothering me,” he says, then taps the empty spot next to him, and I scoot over to close the space between us.

In a couple of months, it will be seven summers since Ireland—a full cycle, Steiner would say. Biologically, our cells do a near-total reset every seven to ten years: new hair, new skin, new bones. Technically, that means much of your current body has not been to any place you traveled seven-plus years ago, that it has no physical recollection of any touch or embrace from back then either.

I will be newly twenty-eight soon and, according to Steiner, starting a new cycle and reaching a new peak. Steiner likens this new phase to being a knight riding a horse, when I’ll begin using my natural talents and finding power and control in my instincts. With a brain that limits my capacity for accident, I will leave my centaur-self behind in fantasyland, but I’ll store her memories of reckless abandon, calling on them when I need their mythic truth. Past this phase, my brain and heart will continue to stretch. Steiner has cycled us out through “seventy and beyond,” where we’ll spend “beyond” taking stock of this life in preparation for the next. In preparation to start over.

Read more from Issue 20.2.