To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (KJV)
Everything in the world moves in cycles. The seasons roll around as planet Earth wobbles toward and away from the sun. We celebrate the Winter Solstice this Sunday as the day that the North Pole and our hemisphere is pointing away from the sun knowing that in good time it will point back towards the bringer of life. The sun itself has cycles of solar radiation, usually 11 years between the shortest set of cycles and a 50 year “Jubilee” cycle that gave the ancients good harvests and a reason to celebrate.
Sine (red) and Cosine (blue dotted)
Humans have their own cycles that sometimes match these natural ones and sometimes do not. My father just turned 75, his life marked by a Depression at the start and perhaps one right now. These things all come back as people forget and often deny that the cycles do indeed exist. Sometimes, simple things come in cycles such as the appearance of Mötley Crüe and Fleetwood Mac at the Xcel Center this winter. There is even a time for the 1980s to come back, it seems.
While time moves in a straight line, it is still cyclical. The loops never close, but the stories become more instructive and profound. While it’s often considered chic to call any time a “new era”, the truth is that the people doing so are not paying attention. Whatever change grows has set its roots in the past. Lessons usually have to be learned all over again because we do not understand how small we are. The rate of change is more important than the particular nature of what is happening when it comes to understanding what it does to our lives.
In mathematical terms, the rate of change is called the “derivative”. Mathematicians starting with Fourier have understood that every wave can be broken down into a series of fundamental waves called sine waves, and their derivative is the cosine. When the waves of change that cycle through our lives are at their extremes, the rate of change is passing through zero and on its way to changing direction. When a situation seems to be in balance, if it is cyclical it is actually experiencing its greatest rate of change.
I’m actually very good at predicting many changes, but only because I can keep my eyes open. In truth, if you really want to surf these waves you can’t stand on the leading edge of what’s about to happen – you ride the wave just past the peak at the point where it’s already turned and starting to move down. I’m often a bit too far ahead of the curve to be useful, but I’m learning how to shill that information like anyone else.
This week, the northern hemisphere of planet Earth is going to experience Winter Solstice at 12:04 UTC on Sunday, 21 December. That’s the darkest day for our part of the world, but it’s also the moment when we start to turn back towards the sunlight. The days only get longer from here. Keep your eye on the derivative, the rate of change, and you’ll know more than where you stand. It’s better to know where we are all going.
21 responses so far ↓
Cristy DLC // 19 December 2008 at 16:23 |
I always like the idea of cycles rather than a straight line. It makes me think that things are never going to get worse forever. We’re just at the bottom of a trough or something. Recognizing the cycles helps us get through rough times and appreciate good times as well.
Eric Pederson with another random thought on waves // 19 December 2008 at 22:53 |
Ask any girl who has dated a surfer how exciting dating a surfer iss and they’ll tell you: boring! The BF surfer is always driving all over the place to find good waves, and then when they get there they go sit on their board for hours on end, mostly waiting for the next wave. The waves rise out of nowhere, but the GF’s report if you watch this long enough you can start to see there is a pattern. The waves come in groups, and the groups come at intervals which there seems to be a pattern to. At the same time, the tide of water is slowly rising or falling along the shore, and the wind is shifting direction as weather patterns pass over and due to the uneven heating of the sea and land that happens every day.
But it really isn’t exciting to be a spectator to all that, so a surfer’s GF usually moves on to another BF, and or occasionally decides to try surfing herself.
It is easy to see the waves when you sit on a splinter of wood at the edge of the ocean, but much harder when you immerse yourself in all that which Man has built in his linear fashion. The waves and patterns are nevertheless always there, beneath everything.
So, uh, yes, I agree. Some surfer’s GF told me all about it. And she was cute – I am easily swayed.
/EP
Gena Berglund // 17 January 2009 at 23:34 |
A spiral connotes movement in the cycles. Go SPIRAL!!
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[...] February 2009 · No Comments History doesn’t repeat itself. As the cycles rise and fall there are always different circumstances, new actors and a different spirit in the people. [...]
Want Ads « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 25 February 2009 at 0:14 |
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[...] This definition of “Depression” places it in a context of history and the natural cycles of human activity. While it’s been 75 years since the last one, it’s worth noting that the previous Depression was in 1893, meaning two cycles in 118 years or 59 years each. Throw in the Panic of 1857 as the last one, and we had 3 cycles in 151 years or about 50 years each. Kondratiev was just about right, on average, and time didn’t stop for the fabulous new modern economy. What’s happening now is simply part of the cycle of things. [...]
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Routine « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 13 March 2009 at 14:52 |
[...] long after it’s a particularly productive thing to do – which I think is the root cause of economic cycles. But in general, we crave having a stable base to draw from as we move through our [...]
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[...] games with money, we will have more of that. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves what makes a sustainable life that is decent and good. What got us where we are today is a lack of basic values – not just in [...]
Hysterical Depression « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 18 March 2009 at 0:08 |
[...] Winter, or a specific situation where the economy simply over-extended itself. To understand the waves of history we have to start by looking at the last three Depressions and what [...]
The Rules « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 20 March 2009 at 0:03 |
[...] figured out these Rules and taken advantage of them. What’s less obvious is that some of us understood this long ago, from a distance, and were morally opposed to the whole construction. We saw people who believed [...]
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[...] they have to have more of it. That’s the concentration of wealth that leads us around the great wheel of history to Depression. Note also that if one nation has a lot of wealth, the same principle applies as it [...]
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[...] and may yet become a way of life as we go through a difficult restructuring. It may also be the foundation of a new era that defines nearly every aspect of how we [...]
Ghost Story « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 8 April 2009 at 0:03 |
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Two Years On « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 10 April 2009 at 0:08 |
[...] is this all about? I think that history never stops for any one culture, but it does have key inflection points. I believe that we are near one now. It’s taken a lot longer for this to look rather obvious [...]
Specialists « Barataria - the work of Erik Hare // 13 April 2009 at 0:06 |
[...] one that they built. By at least one account of the trends that they were a part of, a kind of horrible ending was inevitable. It may even be caused by a search for efficiency and industrial success that focused on [...]
Knowitall « Barataria – the work of Erik Hare // 13 May 2009 at 0:04 |
[...] they manipulate it. It may seem harder to understand, but we developed intuitive ways of at least getting into the rhythms, knowing in our guts if not our heads when something wasn’t right. We came from this world, [...]
Helical Waves « Barataria – the work of Erik Hare // 30 October 2009 at 0:17 |
[...] does seem to come at us in waves, the length of which are just long enough for us to forget lessons that are a bit too tiresome and [...]