In January of 2024, I published an article to my Medium.com account entitled, “I Want To Live Like A Dog". In this article, I first present my idea that I would like to live "Day by Day". In an attempt to redeem the difficult circumstances of life, I wrote:
"I am going to try to “use the difficulty” by staying in the moment, living day-by-day. I know the phrase “day-by-day” because of a song by that name by the Christian hip-hop group from the 1990s, DC Talk. DC Talk’s song was a cover of a song, by the same title, from the 1971 movie Godspell. The song’s refrain follows a 13th century prayer, believed to be written by English bishop Saint Richard of Chichester:
May I know Thee more clearly
Love Thee more dearly,
Follow Thee more nearly.
Perhaps these 800-year-old words will help me with the approximately 800 minutes a day that have the opportunity to stretch into eternal moments of turmoil. Does this temporal attitude eliminate the worries or concerns of the future? No, but hopefully it will minimize the stress and frustration I feel when faced with situations from which I cannot escape or change.
Another video I recently watched (also at regular playback speed) was Neil DeGrasse Tyson talking about how a dog packs its entire life into about 1/7th the amount of time of a human. As NDT says in his video, “[dogs] are some of the most joyous creatures that live among us… their lives have already factored in their mortality.” (link available upon request)
I think I will factor in my mortality and strive, on a daily basis, to choose joy and focus on accomplishing the things at hand which are meaningful in the moment."(1)
One of the books on my "started but have yet to finish" list is a book called The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe. This is a book that looks at four generations (called Turnings by the authors) that occur in repeated instances throughout the ages. In the introduction to The Fourth Turning, the authors describe how humanity has historically thought about time. Here are some meaningful insights from the introduction:
"Over the millennia, man has developed three ways of thinking about time: chaotic, cyclical, and linear. The first was the dominant view of primitive man, the second of ancient and traditional civilizations, and the third of the modern West, especially America.
In chaotic time, history has no path. Events follow one another randomly, and any effort to impute meaning to their whirligig succession is hopeless…
…Cyclical time originated when the ancients first linked natural cycles of planetary events… with related cycles of human activity… Cyclical time conquered chaos by repetition, by the parent or hunter or farmer performing the right deed at the right moment in the perpetual circle… Eventually, great cycles came to mark the duration of kingdoms and prophecies, the coming of heroes and shamans, and the aging of lives, generations, and civilizations. Cyclical time is endless, yet also endlessly completed and renewed…
Unlike chaotic time, cyclical time endowed classical societies with a prescribed moral dimension, a measure by which each generation could compare its behavior with that of its ancestors…
So what's the alternative? Enter the third option: linear time - time as a unique (and usually progressing) story with an absolute beginning and an absolute end. Thus did mankind first aspire to progress. In Greco-Roman civilization, the cyclical view of time was punctuated by inklings of human improvement. The Greeks sometimes hoped that Promethean reason might deliver mankind from perpetual destitution, while the Romans believed that a powerful polity could endow its citizens with a glorious destiny. Most important, the rise and spread of the great Western monotheisms inspired the hope that mankind was fated for more than just fortune's wheel. The Persian, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic cosmologies all embraced the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama. Time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, revelations, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and reentry into the Kingdom of God.
…Along the way, linear time has succeeded in suppressing cyclical time. Ages ago cyclical time conquered chaotic time. But in recent centuries the conqueror has in turn been chained and shackled. The victory of linearism was neither immediate nor absolute… But by degrees, cyclical time as a living faith has been pushed ever deeper into obscurity.
…More recently, the West began using technology to flatten the very physical evidence of natural cycles. With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle.
Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization. Before, when cyclical time reigned, people valued patience, ritual, the relatedness of parts to the whole, and the healing power of time-within-nature. Today, we value haste, iconoclasm, the disintegration of the whole into parts, and the power of time-outside-nature.
…Before, people prized the ability to divine nature’s energy and use it. Today, we prize the ability to defy nature’s energy and overcome it."(2)
These thoughts about humanity's view of time throughout history made me think about a lesson from a high school physics class. If you will permit me a bit of digression into the realm of mathematics, I would like to introduce the cycloid.
Imagine a circle. Imagine the circle is spinning. Now imagine a spot on the rim of that spinning circle and think about how that spot's movement in space would appear. The spot might start at the top center of the circle and, as the circle spins clockwise, the spot would move to the right and downward in an arcing motion. Then, it would hit a point where the spot would change direction and seem to start moving back towards the left while still continuing to move downward. Another point would be reached in the spot's motion where the left direction of movement continues but now the spot begins to creep back up. Lastly, the spot reaches yet another point where it again starts to move to the right as it travels upwards to the top of the circle until it lands at its starting point. Congratulations! You've just visualized a circle in two-dimensional space!
Right and down, left and down, left and up, right and up. Left and right. Up and down. [No, I'm not giving you a Nintendo cheat code.] There are times when the spot is moving forward (compared to its starting point) and times where the spot is moving backwards (compared to its starting point).
Let's add a third dimension to this circle but we do not want to make it a sphere (by introducing a third geometric dimension). Instead, we want to introduce time (linear time, if you are still keeping in mind what was written above) as the third dimension for our circle. When we now think of the motion of our point on the rim of the circle, we have what is called a cycloid. See below.
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| A graph depicting a cycloid. (3) |
As the spot on the rim moves through time around the rim of the circle, we see that there is no longer a backwards motion apparent in its movement. What was a seeming display of progression and regression becomes instead a representation of growth and decline.
How can we apply this to our Day by Day Discipleship? We'll explore that in out next blog entry.
Thank you for reading!
1. Why I Want To Live Like A Dog. Ryan Henneberg. Medium.com. 2024
2. The Fourth Turning. William Strauss and Neil Howe. Three Rivers Press. 1997. Pages 8-11.
3. http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa08/Kuzle/Assignment%2010/cycloid.html
