Doodling Figure-Eights: What the Infinity Symbol Taught Me About Balance

The Figure-Eights in My Meeting Margins

On the last Thursday of October, during a budget call, I looked down at my notebook and counted eleven figure-eights in the margins. Same doodle, drawn without permission from my conscious mind, on every page going back weeks. A loose sideways eight, one loop crossing into the other, over and over. I'd been drawing infinity symbols for months before I ever asked myself why.

It's the sort of habit you don't notice until a slow meeting makes you look. And once I looked, I couldn't unsee what the doodle was doing: one loop for the workday, one loop for everything else, and my pen riding the crossing point between them without ever settling.

The Pendant That Did Nothing (At First)

Being me, I went straight to the solution-purchase phase: a small silver infinity pendant, worn daily, fully expecting balance to arrive by mail. It did not. For two weeks I felt exactly as lopsided as before, just accessorized. I nearly put it away, convinced the whole thing was jewelry-store sentiment.

The problem, I eventually saw, was that I'd worn the symbol as an amulet instead of reading it as a diagram. The infinity sign isn't a charm for balance. It's an argument about what balance is.

Reading the Lemniscate Properly

The symbol is called the lemniscate — Latin for "ribbon" — and the mathematician John Wallis put it into print in 1655 to mean the boundless. But the shape is far older than its math job. Versions of it echo through the Egyptian ouroboros, the Celtic love knot, the Tibetan endless knot, and the coiled kundalini imagery of yoga; on the tarot's Magician and Strength cards it floats above the figure's head as a mark of mastery over opposing forces. In the East, the number eight it resembles carries luck and cosmic order. Two loops, one crossing point, no beginning and no end.

In the geometric-energy framework I work with, ordered forms hold stable fields, and each shape carries a distinct quality. What the lemniscate carries, and what finally landed for me, is this: the two loops are opposites joined at a center — action and rest, giving and receiving, self and other, the seen workday and the unseen evening. And the crossing point is not a place to live. It's a motion.

That was the correction to my pendant mistake. Infinity isn't a held shape; it's a moving one. Balance, if the symbol is to be believed, is not standing still in the middle. It's the perpetual alternation between the two loops, passing through the center over and over, never camping in either. My work weeks weren't broken because I lacked equilibrium. They were broken because I'd moved into one loop and stopped commuting.

The pendant, I should say, stayed on. It just started working differently — less like armor, more like a map pinned to my sternum. Mine is a slim silver piece from RedKnotr, and I touch it now at transitions rather than wearing it as a wish.

Four Practices from a Doodle

Tracing the eight with breath

The core practice: I trace the lemniscate — in the air with a finger, or with my eyes on a drawing — and let breath ride the loops. Exhale tracing the left loop, inhale tracing the right, one long slow crossing between. Two minutes. The first few times my breath and hand argued; by the third session something synchronized, and the effect is oddly like rocking. It's my favorite transition ritual between work and home now.

The two-loop audit

Once a week I name my loops honestly: this month, "work" and "everything else." Then I ask one question — which loop got all my crossings this week? No fixing, just naming. The week I started this, the answer was embarrassing, and the doodles in my margins suddenly made clinical sense: my pen had been filing the complaint for months.

The crossing-point habit

I attached the pendant-touch to real transitions — standing up from the desk, hanging up a call, the doorstep at home. Touch the little figure-eight, take one breath, and mentally cross to the other loop. Some days I catch myself touching it with no transition at all, just anxiety. That's useful information too.

Walking a figure-eight

In the courtyard, when I have ten minutes, I walk a lazy figure-eight path between two trees — left loop, crossing, right loop. It looks eccentric and it does something gait and attention both benefit from: the body literally practices changing direction at a center point. Autumn evenings suit this. So do winter ones, in a coat.

The Margins Now

The doodles haven't stopped — last week's budget call produced another eleven. But they've changed. Slower loops, longer crossings, and lately they come with a breath attached. The symbol didn't give me balance. It gave me a picture of the motion I'd stopped making, which turned out to be more useful than any charm.

If you doodle the same shape without knowing why, it might be worth counting what your margins are trying to tell you.

Questions People Ask Me About the Infinity Symbol

Is the infinity symbol the same as the number eight?

Visually related, meaningfully different. The eight is a standing figure; the lemniscate lies on its side and has carried the meaning of the boundless since Wallis, along with older echoes of knots and cycles. Both point at continuity — eight turning on its side just sets it in motion, which suits me fine.

Which loop is supposed to be which?

There's no fixed rule, in my experience. I read the left as the inward loop (rest, receiving) and the right as the outward one (action, giving), and I've met people who reverse it. The reading that matters is the one where the two halves of your own life show up — name them honestly and the symbol starts working.

Do I need to cleanse or charge an infinity pendant?

If you work with stones and metals, the usual care applies — I rest mine on a selenite plate now and then, and in the geometric framework the shape itself is considered stable and self-renewing. Honestly, the pendant asks less of me than my practices do. The tracing and the crossings are where the work is.

What if I feel nothing when I try this?

Then nothing, for now — and that's a normal result, not a failed one. Some days the tracing feels like nothing to me too. I'd say give the walking-a-figure-eight version a fair chance; moving the pattern through the body lands differently than staring at it. And if it never resonates, your margins will doodle you some other symbol. They usually do.

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