The importance of cycling

My son said to me, “Dad, what’s the most important thing I need to know in life?”

I said to him as follows:

Son, you need to understand the cycles. The cycles will govern your life in all ways.

First is the cycle of the seasons. The cycle of the seasons will determine what you can wear, what you can do, what sport you can play and how much skin you’re allowed to show in public. Be careful though, because there are two cycles of the seasons and they are not in sync. There’s the weather season cycle and the fashion season cycle.  Don’t go looking for summer clothes in the shops during summer, they’ll be long gone. It’s time for autumn in that universe. You need to know what you want to wear in summer while it’s still winter, in winter while you’re still on the beach, and in spring at no time because no-one’s really sure when that season has actually started and, by the time you get a consensus, it’s summer already.  In most respects, winter is time for jeans, scarves, gloves and beanies except in the alternate universe of the shopping centre where it’s time for shorts, t-shirts and models in bikinis – so there’s a small compensation for the psychological dislocation in there somewhere.

The next is the cycle of the ratings. Television stations can’t be bothered to show you good television all year so they’ve mutually agreed on a few months during which strive like horny salmon to show you something worth watching. This is called “the ratings season” – during which the networks desperately try to find someone to rate with. Outside of that it’s all dead floating fish, reruns of Jaws, Seinfeld and, for some reason, M*A*S*H which was probably funny the first ten times. Don’t blame the networks entirely though; they are under a legal obligation to show the three Back to the Future movies, all the Lethal Weapon flicks and at least one National Lampoon movie each year. It’s only a small mercy that the sunset clause in the regulations has come into effect for the Police Academy series and we don’t have to see those again.

The ratings season almost never, for reasons that pass understanding, occurs when you are available to watch television. Your natural work cycle peaks in the middle of the year and tapers off towards Christmas and New Year when the exams are finished, there are a few public holidays, and you might just be able to sit back with a quiet ale and a receptive mind. It’s for this reason that your impersonation of Christopher Lloyd saying “Great Scott!” and your answer to the trivia questions about which three years Marty McFly visited are so good; you’ve seen them every year at the most fertile time in your mental cycle.

Shorter than the cycle of ratings seasons is the news cycle which goes around every twenty four hours. It’s developed on the Dark City premise that the audience’s mind is wiped clean every night as the world is rearranged around them – thus ensuring people need novelty every day to reconstruct their world view. It’s a responsibility the networks take seriously as evinced by the amount of airtime devoted to news and current affairs, even if there’s almost nothing to talk about. This is why celebrity is so important because a little sprinkling of celebrity-dust from Tinkerbell makes even the most mundane happenings worthy of your attention.

The 24 hour news cycle is out of sync (I bet you saw that coming) with the natural cycles of almost everything it reports on.  Business, government, the economy, the environment, in fact everything other than day and night operate on cycles measured in months, years or millennia. News networks get around that problem by just focussing in on some trivial but sensationalisable detail or happening. You’ll rarely get context for the event, just the headline and the scandal. This is partly because you don’t care but mostly because the journalists don’t understand what they’re reporting on. It doesn’t really matter – the story will be forgotten by tomorrow. The tragedy is that a good number of people that run the government and businesses try to adjust their reality to reflect that of the news cycle.  Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein couldn’t figure out a way to fold space-time that tightly but it is sweet to watch the leading figures of commerce, industry and government running around trying to make it happen – bless their little wool-blend socks.

You have to get all of the above to work with your personal cycles: energy cycles, sleep cycles, diurnal rhythms and boredom threshold. If you want to learn how difficult they can be to synchronise, have children.  By your late twenties, you’ll have a well-established diurnal rhythm and sleep cycle but I’ll bet you your first pay packet that your children won’t be spinning at the same rate you are and probably not even on the same axis. They don’t have any respect for your sleep cycle, especially on weekends, and they can scream louder than you can ignore. (On a side note, I don’t recommend getting into an I-can-scream-louder—than-you match with a baby – you’ll lose. Don’t ask me if I’ve tried that).

Finally, and perhaps most critically, is the monthly rhythm of the menstrual cycle. Not yours – see the first line of this post – but trust me it will affect you. Get out of sync with that one and you can ask Dante to introduce you to his mate Virgil’s tour company because his holiday options will be a picnic by comparison.

In a charmed life, son, you will find a point where all the cycles come into synchronisation, just once, and at that moment you will have Gershwin’s trio of satisfaction. For most of us, the cycles wind around us like a deranged serpent, driving us in ever decreasing circles until we disappear up the fundament, never to be seen again.