What If We Could Escape Our Same Old Loops? Wake Up to a New Us and a New Day Tomorrow?
- drjunedarling1
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope.” — Phil Connors in Groundhog Day
Every February 2nd, Groundhog Day, I think not of the weather prediction, but of the movie, Groundhog Day and it’s enduring message. Of course, I get a big kick our of Bill Murray who is brilliant in the movie.
Groundhog Day as a movie has a cult following which includes a past minister who watches the movie with her husband and friends every year.
What makes the movie a thoughtful one for us to consider at least yearly is that it shows the main character trapped in a time loop and we wonder how is he going to escape to a new day? And for me, it mirrors how we we humans get caught in thought, emotion, and behavioral loops.
The same argument with a spouse. The same impatience with a child.The same defensive reaction in a meeting. The same political outrage on repeat. Humans trapped in patterns.
Phil Connors begins cynical, self-absorbed, vaguely superior. When he realizes he must relive the same day, he tries indulgence. If nothing matters, why not eat everything, manipulate people, take what you can?
It works—for a while.
Then he tries despair. Rage. Self-destruction.
Still February 2nd.
What finally breaks the loop is not escape. It is transformation. Phil stops asking, “How do I get out of this day?” and begins asking, “Who can I become inside this day?”
That shift—from yelling and cursing and creating our same circumstances to cultivating character—is the hinge of the whole story.
We repeat mistakes more than we like to admit. Journalist Joseph T. Hallinan (thank you, Gene Sharratt for sharing the book with me) has written about how much of human error comes not from bad intentions but from blind spots. We default to habit. We see what we expect to see. We assume we are thinking clearly when we are actually replaying familiar scripts.
Add emotion, and the grooves deepen. Neuroscience tells us that what we practice, we strengthen. If we rehearse anger, we get quicker at anger. If we rehearse contempt, it becomes easier to access. If we rehearse patience, that too becomes more available (Neuroscientists use this wording "neurons that fire together, wire together.").
Violence, whether in a home or a nation, often begins with what I once called a narrowing. A narrowing of imagination. The moment we reduce someone to “liar,” “enemy,” “problem,” something in us hardens. The script takes over.
I saw it recently in a small, humbling way with my grandchildren. I wrote about that. Voices rose. I leapt to defend the one I perceived as injured. I did not pause. I did not inquire. I reacted from an old script.
Later, through tears, my grandson admitted, “Sometimes I don’t tell the truth because it’s embarrassing.” Beneath the conflict was not villainy but vulnerability. Beneath defensiveness was a conscience trying to surface.
If I had stayed in my script, shame would have ruled the day. Instead, something softened. And that softening changed the outcome.
That is the Groundhog Day moment. It is that split second, the tiny space between stimulus and response - the one that Viktor Frankl made famous in his call to humans to notice it and to use it, to choose to respond wisely rather than impulsively and automatically. I often imagine it as that space we make between our thumb and pointer finger when we slightly curl our hand. Anyway, it's the micro-second where we either replay or revise.
I love the exact quote let me paste in in here: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” —Viktor Frankl*
Leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. understood this at scale. Creative nonviolence was not passive; it was disciplined interruption. It refused to mirror humiliation. It sought a third way—one that preserved dignity while awakening conscience.
Love, in that sense, is not sentimental. It is strategic. It widens imagination when anger narrows it. It says, “You are more than this moment. So am I.”
Phil’s redemption comes when his attention shifts outward. He notices the lonely townspeople. He learns piano. He helps without seeking credit. He loves without manipulation. He becomes the kind of man who could wake up to February 3rd.
The loop breaks when Phil experiments and practices new, thoughtful, wise, kind, disciplined behaviors...his character deepens.
And the same is true for us.
So how do we notice we are caught in February 2nd loop?
One clue is intensity. If my reaction is larger than the moment requires, I may be replaying something older. Another clue is repetition. If I hear myself saying, “Why does this always happen?” it may be time to ask, “What part am I unconsciously rehearsing?”
Groundhog Day offers hope because the change does not come through grand gestures. It comes through daily practice.
A breath before speaking. A question instead of an accusation. A steady tone instead of a sharp one. A choice to regulate before reacting. And the biggest one is intention (Thank you again, Gene, for keeping this front and center in my mind.).
As I mentioned in the previous blog, research shows that even small cues can awaken conscience. In one study, simply placing an image of watching eyes above an honesty box increased contributions. The reminder of being seen shifted behavior. We are more malleable than we think.
What if we placed such cues in our own lives?
A line on the bathroom mirror: “Pause.” A song that steadies us before hard conversations. A shared family question: “Is this who we want to be?”
These are small ways of calling forth our better selves.
Phil Connors doesn’t become perfect. He becomes attentive (Coaches often use the “I AM” cue to help themselves and their clients. It stands for Intention plus Attention equals Manifestation.). He stops trying to control the day and starts trying to grow within it. That is humility. And perhaps humility is what aging well—and living well—really requires.
My mother once said that aging gracefully involves accepting a humbler version of yourself. Maybe that is part of escaping the loop. Not proving we are right. Not winning the argument. But becoming wiser, steadier, more loving.
Groundhog Day is comic for a reason. We are slightly ridiculous in our predictability.
Mystics have long smiled at the ego’s drama. When we can gently laugh at our own scripts, shame loosens and curiosity enters.
The alarm clock will ring tomorrow.
The question is not whether life will magically hand us a new set of circumstances. It is whether we will bring a new self to familiar ones.
Where are we narrowing instead of widening? Where are we escalating instead of enlarging? Where are we repeating when we could be revising?
Every morning offers the possibility of February 3rd.
We do not break the cycle through force. And, of course, our loops are not only personal, but collective - in families, in communities, in countries.
We break it through with attention, intention, humility, and the steady practice of love (in its multiple expressions) that calls forth what is highest in ourselves and others.
That is the quiet question that leads to an invitation for me as I watch the movie, Groundhog Day.
And perhaps it is one of the clearest calls to The Good Life we will receive all year.
How might we take, Groundhog's Day, February 2nd as an invitation to transform, to jump out of our usual looping thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and journey together to The Good Life?
(We can start by watching the old movie. And remember attention plus intention equals manifestation...of a new thought, a new emotion, a new behavior, a transformation in character and escaping old hurtful, ineffective loops that cause us all to suffer and prevent us from living a good life together.)
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