cycles and rhythms
We are at the end of our academic year. Teaching has finished, exams have been sat and marked, and we’re at the end of our boards of examiners process, getting ready for marks release to students on Thursday. And here, I find myself thinking about the rhythm of the year.
Highs and lows, busy times and somewhat less busy times, the year does have its own particular rhythm, and so that rhythm will restart, getting ready for the next year. And so one task for the summer is to go through the notes I’ve written for the class, read some papers and make some additions to the notes, polishing and refining what’s there.
The aikido year also has its rhythm. I didn’t make as many of the courses through the year as I’d hoped, but we are getting close to our annual summer school, which I’ve very much looking forward to. I know that at the end of the week I’ll ache, and it will take a few days for that ache to ease, but it’s a bookend of sorts.
There are the quiet rhythms that inhabit individual days, from waking and journaling, reading, working and aikido and writing.
Interlocking rhythms, short and long, and what song to they combine to sing, and that’s the song of the shape of a life. Each of us with our song, the harmony and dissonance of families and friends. Together, all of us on this Earth combine in a grand and glorious opera, but our collective song is not yet finished.
I’ve been thinking about Surak, the (fictional) character who led the Vulcans away from this song of violence to their (in our watching) current path of logic. I’ve commented on Surak before, but what I find interesting today is that there were always a few Vulcans in the various series of Star Trek who didn’t follow the way of logic, or who disagreed about what the path of logic meant.
Surak comes to mind because I wonder whether we’ll find ourselves, collectively and voluntarily, looking for a Surak, a way for us to follow, and one that we can agree on. What makes this complicated is that there are already a number of different ways that various folk have promulgated as ways for humanity going forward, but we haven’t yet collectively agreed on one to follow.
What will be the song of humanity. Science fiction has been writing about possibilities, optimistic and not, of this song for decades. But what will be our song.
multijimbo 