English term
living life in a circle instead of a line
From the book "Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Voyage, a Lost Age" by Reid Mitenbuler.
This realization was a long time coming. Freuchen’s youth was spent stomping through forests, throwing things, splashing through creeks, looking for birds’ nests, digging up plants to find their roots. He preferred the outdoors to classrooms, although he was never a poor student. He’d been a smart kid, an avid reader when the topic interested him, but he carried an inferiority complex regarding his academic abilities. These he later traced to his boyhood friendship with the genius Bohr brothers—Harald, who would eventually become a famous mathematician, and Niels, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics and help establish quantum theory. Even though the brothers never rubbed his nose in their smarts, sitting in class with such brainiacs was like trying to swim in the frothy wake of an ocean liner. By the time Freuchen reached college, he was conditioned to feel out of place at school. He also looked out of place: a towering six-foot-five in his medical school class portrait, built like a bear, his unkempt hair a blond tornado. Not that a doctor needs to appear a certain way, but Freuchen couldn’t help but seem destined for a different sort of life.
For Freuchen, the dockworker’s death forced a reckoning. It made him ask what a future in medicine really looked like: Rise in the morning, go to work, do the rounds, go home, get up the following morning and do it all over again? To him, this was like ***living life in a circle instead of a line***.
I think I understand what live life in a circle means (the previous sentence explains it: rise in the morning, go to work...), but I'm not sure I understand what "instead of a line" implies.
Thank you.
Non-PRO (2): Christopher Schröder, Yvonne Gallagher
When entering new questions, KudoZ askers are given an opportunity* to classify the difficulty of their questions as 'easy' or 'pro'. If you feel a question marked 'easy' should actually be marked 'pro', and if you have earned more than 20 KudoZ points, you can click the "Vote PRO" button to recommend that change.
How to tell the difference between "easy" and "pro" questions:
An easy question is one that any bilingual person would be able to answer correctly. (Or in the case of monolingual questions, an easy question is one that any native speaker of the language would be able to answer correctly.)
A pro question is anything else... in other words, any question that requires knowledge or skills that are specialized (even slightly).
Another way to think of the difficulty levels is this: an easy question is one that deals with everyday conversation. A pro question is anything else.
When deciding between easy and pro, err on the side of pro. Most questions will be pro.
* Note: non-member askers are not given the option of entering 'pro' questions; the only way for their questions to be classified as 'pro' is for a ProZ.com member or members to re-classify it.
Something went wrong...