Masashi Kishimoto picked a good time to draw Naruto once again with his new one-shot, The Whorl Within the Spiral.

The one-shot explores the parents of Naruto Uzumaki, Minato Namikaze and Kushina Uzumaki, in their younger days during the Third Shinobi World War. You get to see Kushina’s growing tension over being a chosen host for the Nine-Tails Beast – a decision she wasn’t allowed to make. Even so, her love for Minato keeps Kushina from growing into despair.

This flashback Kushina has when her predecessor, Mito, encourages her to to change her perspective in the face of a tradition that psychologically entraps people.

We’ve all been trapped in spirals going down a singular direction that only benefits the people who put us in them. And as this new Naruto one-shot shows, you can’t just gut it out and persevere all by yourself. To break the spiral, a different view provided by someone who cherishes you is definitely needed.

A spiral always leads to “black and white” thinking. It may protect you in certain situations, but it can never give you the intimacy you need to keep going at life. A helix being three-dimensional means there’s multiple and nuanced ways of looking at life situations.

Even if you can’t fully escape the spiral, being around different types of people who make life worth living helps you resist the negative effects and expand your way of thinking.

As the end of the one-shot shows, we can’t predict how the world will turn out. But when we’re with a whorl of a community that cares, at the very least, we’ll be OK and that’s more than enough.