Cycles

I didn't think about cycles for most of my life. Cycles weren't part of the way I was taught. Everything, we're told, is linear or constant.

Now, cycles dominate my life.

For months, my study has been environmental cycles: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous. After a decade without periods, I'm getting to grips with with the phases of the menstrual cycle. I'm learning how to cook and eat properly, which involves learning about hunger, mood, and fatigue cycles. I bought an almanac and take note of the phases of the moon.

To understand the natural world, I try to tune into seasonal cycles, weather cycles, wind patterns, ocean currents and regenerative cycles. It makes me wonder how much of our experience should be cyclical. How many cycles we've tried to straighten, hammering them out like a piece of steel.

So much of our taught approach is always on. We must always be productive, give it our all, have it all, constantly and all at the same time.

We expect to be able to produce the same amount of work every working day for an entire year. We work the same hours no matter what correlation they bear to daylight hours. We try to behave the same, exert the same energy, focus on the same things, no matter the season or the length of the day.

Instead of making time for rest and recognising the strengths of different stages of our day, week, month, or life, we try to fit square pegs into an ever-changing hole. When we can't get the peg in the hole, we feel like a failure. We Google "why don't I feel like running 5K every day?" or "how can I be less tired in the mornings?"

Period ads show women running marathons whilst wearing pads. Train station adverts tell us the reason we're tired when it's dark outside and we're on the way to work, to leave when it's dark again, is because we haven't taken flaxseed supplement. In so many aspects of life, we're told: consistency is key.

We like to think the lunar cycle, the seasons, the cycle of the tides, the daylight and the growth of leaves has nothing to do with us.

We think we can get the best out of ourselves by ignoring our rhythms, overcoming the signals our body is sending us by exerting willpower, conforming our approach to one the same as everyone else's. Perhaps we can power through, remaining the same in what we give and produce when things within and around us are ever-changing, ever-cycling. But should we?

The suggestion that we have more respect for the cycles that affect us isn't a suggestion that we stop trying or slack off. It's that we capitalise, have compassion, and redirect. Trying to power through a sleepier, introspective stage of your day, month, or life doesn't produce better outcomes. There's something in that state. No state is completely bereft of benefit.

Our rejection of cycles has its roots in patriarchy, colonialism, and disconnect from the natural world. It found its legs in Western separation of humans and the natural world, the false conception that the two are distinct and independent, in rejection of other ways of thinking and living, and in distain for and ignorance of hormonal cycles.

Thanks to this legacy (and in no small part to rampant capitalism and the less helpful parts of the self-help industry), we feel like a failure if we don't wake up at 5 am, hit the gym, sit at our marble kitchen island bright-eyed and full of energy, drinking a green smoothie and smashing our inbox, and then proceed to maintain that energy and focus throughout the day until 11 pm. And then do it all again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

I work full time, study a degree, write this blog, dabble in photography, try to see as many places as I can, birdwatch, run, walk, play golf (badly), buy lots of books (read far fewer), do my best to see all my family and friends - so I'll never identify with respecting cycles meaning spending weeks on the sofa drinking herbal tea and burning incense, but I believe respect for cycles can help our lives be more full, if we'd like them to be, or more empty.

An interesting book to read if you're interested in cycles is The Wheel of the Year by Rebecca Beattie.