In the late 1970’s, the band Journey had gone through multiple lead singers in an unsuccessful attempt to find popular success. With their album “Infinity,” the band achieved multi-platinum success for the first time ever [1], which helped them on their way to becoming cultural icons [2]. As one of their many songs dealing with touring or the passage of time in general, the chorus of the song goes, “Wheel in the sky keeps on turning. Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.” In some cases we may know (or at least think we know) where we will be tomorrow, but we find our lives governed by the patterns of wheels in the sky. The ready nature of artificial light in our lives tends to make us forget the sun and moon and the cycle of stars, so busy are we trying to remake the day into whatever we are most comfortable with or whatever time we need to for the purposes of labor.
I spend a large portion of my day dealing with a particularly large and fearsome file that deals with cycles. I try to analyze the patterns that can be found across days, weeks, and months, and there are many fascinating patterns that show up leading me to ponder and dig into and seek in some way to understand, despite all of the complexity involved. Likewise, my life itself is deeply influenced by patterns. I rise, usually, well before the sun is up to get ready for work and (very rarely) eat some breakfast before I head out the door. I have daily and weekly patterns of behavior, including some commanded by God, relating to the practice of honoring His Sabbaths, both weekly and annually. Even, at times, like right now, the monthly cycle of moons intrudes into my life, as the full moons of the first and seventh months of the Hebrew calendar find me celebrating a biblical Holy Day season. In all of these ways I reflect on the cycles that map out our existence, including cycles of generations and ages, even beyond the cycles of years. I have found that such patterns [3] bring a sense of order to a world that can otherwise be a bit too chaotic for my tastes.
Sometimes it is a comfort to know that the cycles that involve so much of my own preoccupation, and that of other people, are matters that have been of interest for many centuries. Once I blogged about an ancient piece of machinery known as the antikythera mechanism [4], which has a great importance both in showing the industrial capability of the ancient world as well as the fact that the ancient world focused so much of its attention on mastering the cycles of time. The fact that ancient peoples would spend hundreds of years perfecting machines that could show the relationship between the lunar and solar calendar suggests that the need to tie months and years together was of great importance to the ancient world. The fact that I spend so much time even now tying together years and months and weeks and days suggests that the matter is of great importance still.
Why do we feel the need to master time? Surely, it slips away from us all, and we find that we cannot recover the sands that have slipped from our grasp forever. On the one hand, it is a comfort to know that we are seeking for eternal life, but all the same there are things that we must either do in this life or not do at all, and we all have much that we would like to accomplish in the years that remain to us, however few or many they are. Even if we can master the patterns that we see, we are still being carried along through the cycles into areas that will be unfamiliar with us, and even if time seems to stand still at times inside our minds, we are subject to decay and entropy and loss all the same, for time only runs away from us so long as we inhabit this mortal plane as beings whose time will, eventually, be at an end. We can often spend so much time looking back and trying to understand that we forget that the cycles of time that are under the wheels in the sky must be lived here and now, or lost forever.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_%28Journey_album%29
[3] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/breaking-the-cycle/
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/15/book-review-calendar/
Edge Induced Cohesion 