Cycles and Fluctuations
This is my contribution to the Indieweb Carnival of November, which is hosted this month by Alex Sirac. The theme chosen by Alex is “Cycles and Fluctuations”.
Each day, we start a new cycle. We wake, get up, are active for roughly fifteen hours, wind down and go to sleep again. The next day, the cycle repeats itself, but never in the exact same way as any of the previous turns.
My days are slightly different. Long covid forces me to divide the day into smaller cycles of roughly 1½ hours of activity followed by 15–20 minutes of rest. On the bright side, this gives me at least eight chances each day to start a new cycle.
This idea of Cycles combined with Fluctuations made me immediately think of a passage from the book I’m currently reading:
“How,” he said, “can a sea be endless!”
“If you sail it,” Frond said, spinning her finger around, “can you not keep going? Past islands, always sailing toward the horizon?”
“But that’s in circles!” the boy said.
“Which have no end,” Frond replied, smiling. “And an ocean, young Kapu, is never the same one moment to the next—it is a road into eternity.” She met Dusk’s eyes and smiled. “You cannot defeat it. You can merely accompany it.”
—from Chapter 3, Isles of the Emberdark by Brandon Sanderson.
Cycles are weird that way: they’re never exactly the same each time. And yet we find some pattern to them and through that pattern, assign meaning.
For example, this February, I fell ill and had a relapse of my long covid symptoms as a result. Currently, I’ve been ill again for the past few days. It would be natural to assume this begins a new round of decreased health and slow recovery.
The conundrum here is that while we’re in a cycle, we can’t tell whether or not it’s truly a cycle at all. We use the perceived inevitability of cycles to predict the future, using the repeating pattern of cycles as a mental model.
But the truth is, I don’t know whether this recent round of illness will start a new cycle of tediously slow recovery. This turn of the cycle could prove to be an upwards spiral instead—only time will tell.
The combination of cycles with fluctuations hints at this feature. Maybe the repeating cycles we perceive are only inevitable up to a certain extent. It’s easy to get lost at sea, so to speak. Only after we’ve spotted land, we know whether we’ve ended up at our starting point or have instead discovered a new route.
When the fluctuations—the deviations from the expected course—are small, we recognize repetitive events as a cycle. It’s only when the fluctuations exceed a certain threshold perceived as “normal”—when we see an unfamiliar island on the horizon—that we say the cycle is broken.
Even if it turns out that I need months again to recover (or indeed, that I don’t recover as much as the last time) the previous cycle of illness and recovery provides some level of comfort and familiarity with what lies ahead. It will be challenging and hard, but it won’t be completely new to me. I have some level of experience to fall back on.
In that sense, cycles are not just negative: they can be more than some pattern we’re stuck in. Their predictability can provide comfort in this ever changing world. No matter what, we can look forward to a new sunrise. We measure the passing of time by keeping track of cycles. As in the quote above, wayfinding at sea is possible because we follow the path of the sun and stars, or the landmarks we’ve noticed in previous journeys. Even though not all cycles are as inevitable as they seem, they do provide a useful scaffolding to our lives.
Based on past experiences, I have some intuition for the best approach to take, in order to speed up my recovery after this recent bout of illness. I can gently nudge my proverbial boat into a different direction, against the undercurrents of inevitability. For me, that means staying a narrow course which balances enough rest with enough activity—both mental and physical. The previous turn of this cycle gives me the confidence I can do this and the optimism to look for new lands this time around. Perhaps this optimism is not entirely rational. It is a form of faith and I appreciate it deeply.
Each day, we start a new cycle. We wake, get up, are active for roughly fifteen hours, wind down and go to sleep again. The next day, the cycle repeats itself, but never in the exact same way as any of the previous turns.
In this way, cycles and fluctuations make our lives bearable: they combine the comfort of the known with the freedom of the unknown. Each cycle begins a new experience to learn from.
