Meditações - ciclos

The second experience of time (change) is the regular cyclical return of the same phenomena: pulse beats, sleeping and waking, day and night, Christmas and Easter follow each other and provoke behaviour that seems unchanging. The seasons of the year alternate with social seasons and give place to recurrences, not of events which can be seen as having a before and an after. Before and after become relative terms, so every before is necessarily an after and vice versa. Spring comes before summer but after winter, just as Christmas comes before Easter or the moment in which certain taxes or bills have to be paid, which both precedes and follows the moment in which others have to be paid. Clearly this second experience of time is much less dramatic than the first in that it dilutes the idea of the irreversibility of change.

Simonetta Tabboni