Cycles are a fundamental construct of our world. Just as time is always present, always moving forward, or so we believe, cycles are always beginning and ending, expanding upon each other, ending one thing to begin something else. All things are in a cycle, whether they might be teetering towards the end or beginning of the cycle, there is not a moment in which something is not in the transition to something else. Having this awareness can allow an individual to find all the ways any particular thing or idea relates to cycles, just as one could with something like time. In this case, I want to focus on how cycles are perceived and identified, how they relate to much of human behavior, how I have identified cyclic patterns in myself, and the limitations of labeling cyclicity as a fundamental.
I used to obsessively focus on cycles, because it was new and fresh to me. To see something like the cyclicity in all things and comprehend it like how one would comprehend time as a coordinate was a shock to me. Of course, I was aware of cycles already, but I was unaware of their fundamental nature. One of the easiest ways to perceive cycles are in the seasons. Things are always in a state of change, and this can be perceived with the changing of each particular season, and there is a point where the seasons repeat their cycle, and it goes on indefinitely. Mind you, they go on because variables impacting that cycle are either not present or not significant enough. If variables are introduced to alter how seasons come and go, the cycle will change or end, too. Another example would be life and death. One has to live in order to die, and so, life is a prerequisite to death. If you are living, you will die, and once you are dead, your body will leave behind nutrients, if left in the ground, to feed other life and allow it to grow, and then die again, which repeats the process.
These are pretty simple ways one can comprehend cycles, and people have been aware of them usually from early ages. It’s a matter of pattern recognition, and it’s hard to ignore the fact that the trees sometimes have leaves, sometimes don’t, and at others, they are colorful leaves. To take this idea further, we can analyze the cycles that are on a higher level of abstraction. The cycles that occur within our minds, and then lead to our actions, and of those, which cycles we can actively choose to participate in or not.
Unfortunately, we must experience cycles like eating, drinking, and sleeping. They happen on a daily basis, or so I hope, and they will continue until we no longer continue. These actions result in our ability to function, to survive, and without these, we would die. Thankfully, we receive feedback from all of these things, in order to keep doing them, and that’s important to note. If we didn’t receive any feedback, or very little feedback, we probably would do these things too little or not at all. Of course, there are many reasons for why we do feel that feedback, but one simplification is that we feel good from doing the thing, or something positive comes of it, and this promotes the urgency to continue the cycle. This is generally the premise or idea that I hold when talking about cycles that are to do with our physiological uptake, however, it can extend beyond this.
If we’re fortunate enough, we don’t think about these needs until they are required. We don’t feel the need to sleep if we aren’t in a state of experiencing fatigue, nor do we feel the need to drink if we lack thirst. When these things are required, we fulfill them, and then go back to whatever we were doing that wasn’t focusing on filling the metaphorical health bar. This type of thought process could be applied to cycles that have a further abstraction.
I have a cycle where I spend some time playing VRChat, then I stop, and then I have a period of time when I play a lot. It ebbs and flows, it comes and goes, and it has to do with how I’m feeling. If I feel awful, and I find that I am unable to do the things that I otherwise would do, then I have to adapt to that new situation. After enough playing around with what works and what doesn’t, I ended up down a path where playing that particular game was a means to relax and allow myself to feel. It worked, because if it didn’t, I wouldn’t keep doing it. I felt something while playing, and that triggered me to learn that each time I did play, it would feel good, therefore it was something to fall back on. If that didn’t work, I wouldn’t feel enjoyment, and so the cycle would end. That would usually lead me back to the reality where I could do the things I would normally spending my time on, or I would have to find something else. This is a cycle, and its foundation is based upon how I’m feeling, or rather, my reaction to a lack of something. In this case, it would be a lack of feeling good, and because what normally would make me feel good did not work like usual, I had to find something else.
I’d like to imagine all people have hierarchies of the things they like to do or are willing to do when things aren’t operating like normal. If they feel upset, they go and do the thing they have experience with making them feel less upset. It might be talking with friends, going for a walk, or drinking. It depends on what has worked in the past, and if the things that normally would work, don’t, they feel only further distress. They want to understand why they feel awful, and why their means of escaping the feeling are failing, because they don’t want to feel that way. I understand this completely, as I’m no different. However, this can go another layer deeper. Not only do we have a cycle in which we fall back into things we would use to make ourselves feel okay, we then have a cycle in which we distress over our awful feelings, and then eventually, after some amount of time, things return to normal.
If what normally would work, does not, and the things I normally would fallback on also aren’t working, the next step I would take is to find out why that is. I would lay in bed trying to understand my feelings, maybe I would try meditating, or maybe I would begin reading over past journal entries in order to understand what has gone wrong. At one point or another, I would have to sleep, or something would catch my attention and I couldn’t focus on looking internally, and after enough time, it would pass. This happens every single time. If it didn’t, there would be only two situations in which that would occur in this context. Either I would never have to enter the feeling of distress, or I would never actually leave it. Obviously, neither is reflective of reality, as I have left those feelings every single time, and I’m certain I will enter them again. These cycles will not stop, I could pay a large amount of attention to the fact I have those feelings, or I could acknowledge that they will pass like every other time, but they will be there, starting somewhere, and then they won’t be there, ending somewhere else.
As I spend more time with myself, I grow more aware of the ways in which I act, and probably how other people act. Due to this, I can recognize common patterns that align between myself and others. These patterns lead me to believe in some particular ideas, and one that relates to cycles is my feeling that people are addicted to living. I mean to say that the majority of people cannot stop themselves from living, they enjoy it too much, even the people who claim they are in a state of misery. I cannot deny that there are those whom could not bear life, and so they stopped living of their own choice, and it’s a terrible thing, and it does happen, but it is in the minority of individuals, not the majority. For the majority, then, they love to live. They love doing the same thing, over and over, both the fool and the intellectual love it just the same. Perhaps they aren’t following the same exact cycles, but they are within cycles nonetheless, and they find them addictive.
The fool could be in a state of doing something pretty simple consistently, over a long period of time, without recognizing the staleness of the thing in which they do repeatedly. In one of my previous job positions, I was literally doing one of these things, and everyone who had at least an average intelligence must have been experiencing something akin to insanity or anguish in a relatively short period of time. Imagine opening boxes, filling shelves, and repeating the process, and then going home, resting, to repeat that same exact thing again. It sounds pretty terrifying, right? Maybe not for the fool. The fool can do the same thing, over and over again, and find no difference in the thing they are doing. In this particular circumstance, that means the fool can do this process for an indefinite amount of time, fail to recognize the repeating patterns, and feel either enjoyment or neutrality with the task. However, the only difference from the fool and someone with more intelligence is the complexity of the cycle.
Instead of the simplicity of the fool, the intellectual could be doing something complex consistently, but simple and complex are subjective, but to the majority of society, someone discovering new mathematics would probably be considered intelligent. This type of person is still in a state of doing the same or similar cycles over and over again. The only difference is that, to the one participating in the cycles, there is a feeling of growth and change in the cycles. This person might discover new things, and then go off to discover something else, or to understand something different, but there is always a feeling of newness, because there is some sort of change. That’s the most notable difference between someone within cycles that are simple rather than nuanced. They still are both stuck in cycles, but one is in a state of doing the same exact cycle, or one very similar each time, and the other is in a state of grasping or understanding more in each subsequent cycle.
We probably could loosely measure intelligence by how long it takes for a person to recognize the repeating patterns in a cycle they consistently experience. Someone who can find those patterns faster can be generally denoted as more intelligent, and those who are slower can be labelled as less intelligent. Although a meaningful argument could be made in response to what would be considered a simple task. Perhaps I felt like I was going insane in my previous position because I had lacked the ability to perceive more, and if I were able to, I would have received more from every experience, and thus had more to look into whilst doing generally the same task. I could’ve focused more deeply on what my fingers were feeling, what my eyes were seeing, what I was smelling, and doing this with every new type of product I’d perceive. There is also the avoidance of insanity by shifting my focus onto something else entirely, like trying to maintain a meditative state while doing the repetitive task. These things are true, but I find it unlikely that the fool would be aware these options are available to them, because to that type of person, they aren’t looking for more, there are already satiated to their maximum, there would be no more room for more in them.
It is generally accepted that the intellectual person is not so dissimilar from the fool. This has already been established in the fact that both are experiencing and partaking in cycles, as they’ve both chosen to live. Yet, it cannot be ignored that they both feel contentment in their cycles and are unable to see beyond whatever it is they are doing in the present.
There are confinements to being a human being, and one of them is that we must experience cycles. Just as they happen on the outside, they happen on the inside. We can perceive them in both our internal and external worlds. They happen on the physiological scale, and they occur in our thought patterns. In order to live, one has to enjoy living. There needn’t be reason to live, one merely has to feel good as a result of living, and because people like to feel good, as long as they feel good, they’ll keep the game running. People are always in a state of experiencing one cycle or another, and even the ones of further abstraction, both relative to what is known as foolish or intelligent, are merely relative to how it makes the person feel. To the fool, it feels good to do the same thing over and over, it just happens to be simple relative to whatever the intelligent person is doing. However, they’re both doing the same thing, just one is considered complex because it has nuanced tasks and the individual experiences growth within their cycles, rather than a lack of either. On top of this, just like the simple person who cannot grasp anything further than allowed by their genetic limits, the intelligent person acts in the same way. Neither can see beyond their present perception, and sure, one can continually step towards a path of increased perception, but in that, too, there are limitations. Both the fool and the intelligent person are stuck in a state of experiencing this, but at the very least, the latter is aware of their fallibilities, or so I’d hope.
Many times in my life I have questioned why I have put myself through so much, and why I continually do so. I’ve had no choice but to succumb to the feeling that I must be addicted to life in the same way everyone else is. Despite being convinced at many times that my suffering could never end, and that life brings nothing more than pain. There were even times I was convinced this realm to be Hell. Yet, I love cycles, I love doing many of the same things time and time again, and it is only until I have begun to feel awful or unable to participate in the cycles that I enjoy that I begin to feel bad. I’m in love with doing many of the same things, over and over again, and if this weren’t the case, I wouldn’t choose to live.
The cycles I enjoy experiencing come and go, but many of those things are reoccurring, and there are all the things that never go away, because I can’t make them go away. I can’t stop drinking, eating, sleeping, breathing; I am required to do these tasks, these cyclic dances, in order to live, and I must love doing them, otherwise I would stop. I’ve talked about some of the cycles that I enjoy. Writing, reading, learning, drawing, music, and other forms of consumption like watching shows or videos. Cycles come in mainly two particular flavors, at least in the context of human behavior. We have one, in which the person is internalizing, and the other, where they externalize. This too, I’ve made mention of. Simply, internalization is taking things in, while externalization is putting things out. As humans who perceive, we’re always in a state of taking things in, or feeling things, and we externalize in a variety of forms, of which, we do regularly.
There are some cycles which happen throughout our entire lifetimes, and we don’t have much control over them. We are always breathing, and our hearts are always beating, until they don’t. Other cycles we have control over, like talking to others, sometimes we do, at other times, we don’t. In our waking hours, we are aware of the ways we’re perceiving, like seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing, and tasting. Within any of these things, we can break them down further to analyze what cycles are occurring within each cycle. I mean this both as the moments where the cycle ends and another begins, and also the cycles that build up each “larger” cycle.
Suppose a situation where you are talking to one other person. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, the two of you are talking back and forth. You speak, thus externalizing, and once you begin speaking, a cycle begins, and once you stop speaking, it ends. You listen, thus internalizing, and once you begin listening, the same pattern repeats as with speaking. When you start speaking, a cycle ends, which is one where you are not in a state of silence. On top of this, other cycles are beginning and ending as a result of you speaking. When you speak, you aren’t inhaling, you’re exhaling, and that happens whether or not you speak, but it is altered in a time of chatter. How you present yourself while speaking and listening depends on the person. For example, some individuals like to express emotions with their hands, and because they are controlling their hands, when previously they might have not been, both cycles are beginning and ending. There are many more cycles occurring at deeper and darker depths, it’s a matter of how willing you are to go into the deep-end.
While speaking has many different cycles going on in order to either allow you to speak or supplement your speech, there are many cycles that had to come before the talking to allow you to speak. Once again, this can go indefinitely deep. You had to be born to speak, you require a beating heart to speak, you require a mouth, and there are many functions and systems all acting together in order to bring you to the point of being able to speak. Ultimately, cycles are fundamental to all things, and because of its universality in our perception, there will always be ways to break down what is being perceived to a cycle. This might be intellectually true, but often times, especially in reference to our own behavior, we fail to realize that cycles are not always of equal sizes. One of a larger scale is harder to acknowledge than one of a smaller scale, and because of this, some might confuse the former as not being a cycle at all.
Take for example an average person in the year 1600. This year doesn’t have any particular significance in this context, but it is far back enough to display how one can be blissfully unaware of what is to come. That average person has no idea of something like electricity, which most individuals in the developed world, take for granted, because they’ve had it for so long. That person could identify the fact that all things are cyclic but have no idea that electricity is a thing to come. What this leads to is that, just as that person started and ended with a life of no electricity, many of us will likely begin and end a life with electricity. Many of us fail to recognize that there were times where electricity was not discovered, and if patterns are to withhold truth, there will be times when electricity is no longer known. Eventually, we will fizzle out, and there will be no humans, nor anything else, probably. As a result of this, there will be no electricity, thus the cycle, as we know it anyway, returns to its original state. At this scale, we don’t perceive the things outside of our lifetimes, and that it makes it more difficult to assign the label of “cycle” to these types of abstract ideas.
While cycles are universal, there is truth in the fact that some things do not come back again. This usually has to do with humans and their choosing of particular actions. Suppose a situation where a person reads a particular book and then does not read it again. They were in a state of not having read it, then they were in the midst of reading it, and then they had read it. Just because cycles are universal does not mean each specific thing repeats, however, things fall within parameters. Perhaps that person won’t read that particular book again, but it is likely they will read another book again, or they will read again, in some form or fashion. There is a limitation to assigning cycles as a universal, and this is one of them, we can’t apply it exactly the same to each particular and specific thing. Another trap to avoid is being too confident in your pattern recognition skills and thus assigning particular consistent behaviors as cycles.
It might be true that those repetitious behaviors occur again and again, and you can recognize that. However, it’s important to stay wary of the idea that just because something is in a cycle, you then will be unable to break out of it. This is not the case, at least depending on the level of detail. If I believe I have a cycle where I brush my teeth every morning, we could call this a routine as well, I could break that cycle by not brushing my teeth. Of course, I wouldn’t want to do that, and I have rational reasons as to why I do brush my teeth every morning, however, just because it occurs consistently does not mean the cycle can’t end. I say this because it could be used as an excuse to maintain destructive or harmful behavior, rather than changing it, because there is some belief that due to the universal cyclicity of things, you have to return back to the beginning of the cycle in reference to whatever particular thing it is.
Cycles are part of us. They make us who we are, we do the things we like again and again. Some of us are in cycles that promote change and growth, while others are in cycles that are simple and stagnant. We are all in cycles that enable us to exist, such as the repeating patterns of eating and drinking. The cycle, at its rudimentary level, is part of everything. All things are in a state of transition from beginning to ending. With this identification, we can look further into what makes up many of the things we enjoy, or we don’t enjoy, or the things we do but don’t know quite why. Awareness is a step forward in the right direction, but it’s important to be considerate to the limitations of this identification, such as the level of specification of the cycle we want to investigate. I genuinely cannot stop thinking about cycles, just as time has not left me alone. I expect I will continue to think about cycles, and hopefully, I will have that cycle, just like all others, end.