The Negative Impact of Seasonality on our Thinking

I have recently been confronted with the one year anniversary of my father’s passing. During the weeks before this event, in between chores and taking care of a toddler, I was trying to latch on to some kind of meaning. What does this one year anniversary mean? Inevitably, as I then found myself politely discouraging my son from loading the dishwasher tray with his books, I decided that maybe a meaning would simply present itself, much like a train pulling into a station.

Thinking of time as circular certainly made sense from the days of early humans. The sun and moon arc across the sky, day follows night follows day, the seasons rotate around, tides go in and out, and a level of certainty is bestowed upon the witnesses to these events; a comforting eternal rhythm that reliably would eventually repeat itself. Expectation and hope flourish out of the anticipation of the next part of the repetition.

Seasonality has been strongly linked to the availability of food, which in more primitive times meant survival. The migration of animals and the lifecycle of crops have both presented challenges for humans to continue to eat, especially when there was a lull in the annual cycle. The return of food would inevitably be marked with celebrations.

Fast forward through the years and the days become laced with holidays that reliably appear again the following year. Reappearance and rebirth are strong themes in mythology, no doubt because by the time they were cobbled together, cyclical thinking had become ingrained in many cultures; it made sense to those telling the stories and to those listening to them.

At this point, though, a fundamental error has been made. Time, as understood by the cycle of the year, is not how human life works. Despite the seasonal cycles we witness, our lives are linear. We are born, we age, we die, and we don’t come back. Even when the Earth appears the same after the passage of a year, it isn’t.

Seasonality appears to have provided us with so much comfort and reason to celebrate and find meaning in recurrence that it has ruined our ability to think clearly.

If our minds are primed to view events coming around again, it is perhaps easier to forget about aging and our forthcoming deaths. By minimizing these thoughts, one of the greatest anxieties of all time, existential dread, can be pushed to the background. This cyclical illusion of sameness perhaps shields us from the thought mandated by confronting change in our lives. If we feel that we are still experiencing the same natural rhythms from our childhood, maybe that is when we decide to drop anchor on our desire for further change or growth?

Viewing time as circular protects us from the burden of thought, but it also creates the burden of finding meaning in recurrence where there perhaps isn’t any.

I appear to be wired in such a way that this time every year for the rest of my life, I will at least sense that this is the time of year in a previous year that I lost my father. But it is worth reminding myself that one, he wouldn’t want me to make an event out of his death, and two, the idea of riding with him along the track to the end of my own days, is far more meaningful than the yearly occurrence of death day.