Spiralical Pattern in Time

Questions:

• Is pattern in time cyclical or spiralical?
• What the hell is “spiralical”?
• Did you just make up a word?
• Why should we care?

Oh dear me, I was thinking this was going to be a swift post, but my mind is already complicating things, as per usual. So, let’s just talk about trends for this moment. People say trends go in cycles, yes? Fashion trends always pop up again in a few decades, Hollywood likes to remake old movies, and thus we march on into the infinite future. How depressing, it must look something like this:

We apply this line of thought everywhere. The seasons go in cycles and Winter always gives way to Spring. We’re on a yearly cycle with the sun. We talk about the circle of life. This sort of thing I’ll be calling “pattern in time” and so we imagine time as a ring. Though it’s boring, we take comfort in that we know we’ll be coming back around at any moment. It’s confined and safe. We model our lifestyles after these cycles.

I think this is crap.

I like to think of pattern in time as a spiral. So, how is this different?

Fashion trends don’t reoccur verbatim of their previous life. We take inspiration from a previous trend and build upon it (even if slightly) and thus it isn’t arriving at the same place on a ring. It’s evolving. (Oh shit, he said the “e” word!)

Hollywood doesn’t literally put the exact same movie in theatres for a remake. They remake it, take inspiration from the previous film and build on it (Rambo XXXIII: 33rd Blood). So too, does Winter not give way to the same Spring that already happened! We have mild Winters, harsh ones and freak ones, each unique among it’s ancestors but all sharing the same DNA.

Further more, these cycles will not endure. This solar system will not be around forever and certainly the “cycles” we see on Earth (seasons, day/night, etc.) will be around for even less time. So, let’s get down with some spiralical time:

What the hell is “spiralical”, you ask? Why good madams, sirs and transgenders, it’s a word I just now made up. It relates to spiral in the same way cyclical relates to cycle. So if cyclical is defined as:

“Recurring in cycles or periods of time in which certain events or phenomena repeat themselves in the same order at the same interval.”

Let’s hack in our spiral, so that spiralical means:

“Patterns in time occur in a spiral form, in which periods of time, certain events or phenomena imitate previous periods or events.”

Wow. Really dry stuff, huh? So, why do I feel this to be profound enough expound it on my soap box? Well, I’ll tell you.

If time is a cycle, if it is a ring, then events are simply boring reoccurrences. They’re a nuisance. They’re like your daily chores. They aren’t special! Further, I believe it to be a misleading symbol in that it implies permanence where there is none. It’s mechanical. It’s clean. It’s sterile. Static.

But, if pattern in time is spiralical, every moment counts. We will not occur again, not in precisely this way at least. Even now, you’re body is changing constantly; you’re literally are not the same person you were a moment ago. This symbol for pattern in time is organic and dynamic. Everything is new; even if inspired by the past and we remain connected to our ancestors along the sprawling ivy of time.

I know some object to this line of thought. It’s gloomy and square to point out the finality of it all. Some might also dislike time spiraling out of control into the abyss. It’s spooky to think of “everything” being “over”. Alas, in my mind, it seems so. Perhaps I’m wrong, but let’s explore this symbol a little more.

You’ll notice a feature in the spiral, something like inflation. With each pass we are further away from our origin and with each pass we increase the amount of deviation from our last pass. That might be getting a little too abstract, let’s try to visualize it.

So, I’ve plotted some points on our spiral. Depending on what scale of pattern we’re thinking about, these intervals can be looked at differently. Here’s the gist. If we take the center as our origin, deviation from that point implies change.

Let’s take it from the pattern of human development. We can think of it like this, if G is pre-caveman days, F might be the beginnings of man but E might be the Middle Ages. Since F and G are closer in proximity things aren’t too different looking (in context!). But, between F & E is 1.5x the distance from F & G. So, we see an increase in change. The landscape of Earth looks quite different with knights and kings and serfs building castles. Even more so if we take our current point in time (around D, maybe?). We, as humans, don’t exhibit hardly any of the same patterns we made in our ape man days and we’ve drastically modified our environment since then (mostly for the worse). By the time we reach A, we might not recognize ourselves at all. Robot-Bodies! Boogedy-Boo!

Now, I’m not saying that all patterns we can observe have the same rate of this inflation. The pattern of seasons would have as much lower rate of inflation and thus produce more evenly and closely placed intervals. So, seasons exhibit roughly the same behavior from year to year with minor differences (in context!) in the event/period of time. But, as our planet ages and the sun begins to die, we’ll see increasingly drastic and ultimately fatal changes in the seasons until the pattern that was the seasons is no longer recognizable. It has become part of another pattern.

Or it always was. Wink!

Notes:
There are a few problems that arise with this symbol. For example, what happens when a drastic event obliterates a pattern? Perhaps the spiral ends? Does that even make sense? I think most of the issues arises with how we look at time and break it into arbitrary chunks. Perhaps if we gather all the patterns in time together, we’d see a fractal pattern rather than a spiral. Or perhaps it looks like white noise. Who knows? More on this later.

Disclaimer:
I’m certainly not applying this symbol scientifically (though one might, I won’t… for now). I’m presenting it as an outlook. A myth. A simile. Pattern in time is like a spiral. In this way, I’m not trying to explain specific phenomena so much as provide a way of looking at these things that is helpful and adds to the enjoyment of life. If we break this symbol down too low, like any symbol, it’s too rudimentary to accurately describe anything. Just as if I draw a picture of a face, no matter how detailed I make it, I have not made a physical head, but just a drawing that represents a head. So, the spiral is not pattern in time, but a symbol pointing towards that concept. Concept! Tangent!