Cycles within cycles within cycles

Our planetary home is a near-sphere, a sphere so smooth that were it reduced to the size of a billiard ball it would be smoother; Mt Everest would be but a microscopic anomaly.  Since the beginning of Life our sphere has been spinning its days and orbiting its years around our Sun, the primary source of life sustaining energy. 

This spinning, orbiting sphere provided an environment for Life that was inherently cyclical, night giving way to day, winter yielding to summer, regularly and predictably.  It was inevitable that Life would resonate cyclically; that it would itself be intrinsically cyclical from its very inception, and that it would evolve into an increasingly complex and diverse set of interlaced cycles within cycles within cycles; cycles that also permeate our aggregate behaviour, our social processes and patterns. 

In this pervasively cyclical environment the linearity of man^[1] sits uncomfortably. 

The cycles of Nature and the resonating cycles of Life roll inexorably and largely immutably through time.  Human attempts to block them require enormous and debilitating effort and are invariably doomed to failure: we cannot, for example, continue to live for any significant length of time without sleep, and neither can we live without dying.  At best, we appear to be able to level the peaks and troughs of some cycles. 

In trying to avoid or level the peaks and troughs of some of the cycles that impact on our lives we pay not only a price in effort, but we may also be setting ourselves up for an inordinately high set of peaks and troughs at some later date, when Nature and Life seek to release accumulated tensions.  Cycles are purging and rejuvenating^[2].  The purge cleans out the contaminants that have built up, and gives the cycle a fresh and invigorated start.  A purge that has not been allowed to run its full course may leave impurities in the system that fester and grow, that block the safety valves of Nature and Life, causing pressure to build, pressure that must be released somehow, sometime. 

The contemporary urban lifestyle gives no quarter to the cycles of Nature.  Humanity has imposed its linear order on the day and the seasons.  We get up at the same time every day of the working week because if we don't we'll miss the train and be late for work.  It does not matter that it is still dark outside, or that your body perhaps needs more sleep in winter than in summer - you must get up. 

Our key cycles are daily and weekly.  The weekly cycle is a human invention - it has no basis in Nature.  The lunar cycle has no direct relevance to contemporary life and is ignored.  While the lunar cycle would originally have been the basis for the month, as the monthly cycle and the lunar cycle are not synchronised (the lunar cycle lasts 29.53 days) the full moon can occur at any time of a calendar month, and some months may even have two full moons. 

Nature's cycles are at one time its mysteries, and the key to unlocking those mysteries.  Without consciousness of at least one of the cycles of Nature, humankind would not have been able to start unlocking the secrets of the Universe.  And the more cycles of which there was an awareness, the more keys were at our ancestors' disposal. 

It often takes a cycle to recognise another cycle. 

How many of us today ever have the inclination or luxury of studying the cycles in the Heavens, night after night, year after year?  Yet this seemingly frivolous pastime was critical to the development of the mathematics and physics that sustain our civilisation. 

Our ancestors, close to the land and the elements, will have been keenly aware of Nature's many ebbs and flows: the obvious daily, lunar, and annual seasonal cycles; the less obvious cycles in the Heavens; the less certain cycles of longer duration.  The more perceptive among them will have noticed correlations between seemingly unrelated events, and would have then identified subordinate cycles that had not earlier been apparent.  Human inquisitiveness^[3] would then not have rested until a cognitive linkage was established, sometimes mythical and romantic, sometimes rigorous and logical.  So myths and knowledge were born. 

The Mexica (or Aztecs) of pre-Hispanic Mexico developed the perhaps not so mythical linkages between natural cycles, and human personalities and moods into a fine art.  Their expectation of imminent cataclysm and their desire to ward it off by continually appeasing their Gods had heightened their sensitivity to natural patterns and any anomalies in those patterns. 

The day on which you were born was of great import to the kind of life you might expect to have.  Special divines interpreted the two Mexican calendars, gave new infants their names, and, from the place of the birth day in the calendar cycles, predicted their lives with certainty.  Perhaps these predictions were self-fulfilling: they affected the conduct of the child's parents towards them, and the child itself, so that it may have been almost impossible to triumph over such expectations. 

The calendars also indicated whether a good time had come to start on a journey; when war should be declared; and, when to begin the harvest. 

The contrast with our modern-day lives could not be greater.  Yet, beyond the technological shell within which we live, Nature continues to roll cyclically, and if those cycles affected us in days of old, there is no reason to believe that they do not continue to affect us now. 

The cyclical nature of Nature has inevitably set up sympathetic cyclical patterns in the endeavours of humankind, despite our contemporary tendency toward linearity and the denial of the importance of the bigger and less visible cycles in our daily lives.  Not only do we have lifecycles, but so do the organisations and societies that we form, entities with lives of their own^[4] that may or may not outlive us.  The ageing process that so inexorably besets us is also the bane of all our organisations. 

There is an imperative, a drive in these cycles that we can ignore or contain for only so long.  Let us identify the key cycles, and wherever the troughs don't appear to compromise our objective of indefinite civilised survival^[5], harmonise with them.