Pylimitics

The September 28 issue of Westenberg, the website/newsletter of JA Westenberg, is all about the consistent and ubiquitous hill-shaped curve followed by both natural and human-produced phenomena. Westenberg calls it the arc. It applies to anything that grows, peaks, and declines, and that includes everything from empires to languages to companies to the stars in the sky. A system draws on a limited supply of something. The system grows as long as the supply is available.

Eventually:
• limits are reached (maybe the “something” runs out, like the sun will eventually exhaust its reserves of hydrogen)
• conditions change (like the internal politics of an empire shift)
• competing systems arise (like digital photography appeared, but Kodak ignored it — even though they invented it)

When at least one of those things occurs, the system begins to contract. It has peaked. You can find this arc everywhere, Westenberg writes.

It’s early October here in southern New England, and the seasons are changing. Autumn is arriving. One way to look at that is that summer has “peaked.” But in some cases, there’s another way to look at it. Within natural systems, there are cycles inside the arc. On an unimaginably vast time scale, we’re inside the arc of the nuclear processes of the sun. Luckily for us, we’re on the side of the arc that’s on the rise. Also luckily for us, in the case of the arc of the sun, that doesn’t mean it’s continuing to get hotter; the arc here is simply a measure of the hydrogen reserves.

But on a human time scale, it probably wouldn’t matter very much if we were on the other side of the peak, because we’re talking about billions of years here. But look closer. For those billions of years, the earth is orbiting the sun, embedding us in an annual cycle of seasons. While that happens, the earth is also spinning, embedding us in a daily cycle. And the moon is orbiting the earth, embedding us in a monthly cycle of everything from tides to how dark a night might be.

Every arc is a story that has an ending. But in terms of the earth and our lives, it’s the cycles that matter more. In the climate where I live, winter is sometimes referred to in terms of death, like “the plants die.” But they don’t; they’re just in a different part of the seasonal cycle. It’s not a phase that we humans experience directly; we don’t enter a quiescent stage that we later emerge from, unless you want to metaphorically invoke sleep. That isn’t the same thing, but metaphors can be stretchy.

My point is that we exist in cycles at least as much as we exist in arcs. The seasons are just one cycle. There are far smaller cycles too; even breathing. In some forms of meditation, the first thing you learn to do is focus on your breath. The cycle of inhaling and exhaling. You can find cycles in much of the lore and mythology we’ve inherited from antiquity, too. A great deal of what we recognize as wisdom incorporates the idea of cycles.

The leaves on New England’s trees shift from green to red and gold, and eventually fall to the ground. But the trees aren’t dead; they’re turning to the next part of the cycle. I think turning might be a better term for such seasonal changes, and a better metaphor than birth and death.

As Westenberg writes, You are not the exception to the arc. And the cycles apply to all of us as well.