Random Musings # 54: Purple Patch!
Circadian Rhythm!
Some phrases are as musical as they are meaningful. This particular one hits the right notes on both counts.
Circadian suggests, by how it sounds, to me at least, the song of birds or the buzz of insects. Latin though and so, actually, meaning something else. Circa diem! That is, “about a day”.
Here again, open to more than one interpretation. While it is ‘about a day’, as in ‘roughly, a 24 hour period’, I see it also as ‘about a day’, as in ‘about a day, in our lives’.
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences describes Circadian rhythms as ‘physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. These natural processes respond primarily to light and dark and affect most living things, including animals, plants, and microbes’.
This brings me to what I am reflecting on. If there is a cycle and there are changes within just a day, surely there will be cycles and changes over longer periods of time?
Let’s take the days of the week. Monday, for example. Who does not know about Monday blues, even if by the slimmest of chances one has been fortunate enough to have not experienced it. And, Monday blues is not just about dreading returning to school or work after a blissful weekend. It has to do with the fact that it is Monday which gets its name from the moon.
The moon does seem to affect emotions with research suggesting that humans react to subtle changes in the earth’s magnetic field that occur with the moon phases.
And on a fortnightly basis, if full moons and no moons can cause the mighty oceans to rise and fall why or how would we mere mortals be immune?!
Then we come to seasons. Seasons having an effect of how we are and feel is beyond a doubt.
“Spring is when life’s alive in everything.”
“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”
“Come fall, we may feel a heady mix of nostalgic yearning, renewed optimism, and abstract melancholy.”
“Winter tames man, woman, and beast”, wrote none other than Shakespeare.
And through all these we hit purple patches. And lean patches too. Not just in sport but in family, work and social life too.
A semblance of a purple patch is what actually got me thinking. Experiencing one and not for the first time. When all things seem to be going one’s way. Confidence. Energy. Positivity. Sharpness of mind. Assertiveness too though having learnt, over time, to temper it to avoid it coming across as aggressive.
Humbler each time, knowing that, for sure, a lean patch will follow.
For Ups and Downs, this is what life is about. Life is but a roller coaster with its share of spills and thrills as well as the rare, while welcome, bouts(!) of cruising along.
Though clichéd, ‘it is really OK to be not OK all the time’, and so I have learnt. It is also true that ‘this too shall pass’ and that ‘what does not kill one makes one stronger’.
For those amongst us who follow Indian cricket, we are only very familiar with the purple patch that SKY hit followed by the one that Gill has hit. Through all this Rahul’s lean patch continues and one hopes that tying the knot with Athiya turns the tide for him! For his dad-in-law’s famous line “Main tumhe bhool jaon yeh ho nahi sakta … aur tum mujhe bhool jao yeh main hone nahi doonga”, must surely be ringing in his ears all the time!
Having lived as many moons as I have lived, I realise one thing though.
The key challenge through the circadian cycles, weekly waning, seasonal swings and purple patches is being consistent through these. Being consistent in one’s behavior, values and basic nature.
Like how nature, through the passing of eons, stays consistent — the earth continues to go around and rivers contine to flow into the ocean, among other things.
G. A. Tawney wrote, back in 1906, in his The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods “Consistency is a queer thing; a jewel among the virtues and the bugaboo of little minds”.
Change may be the only constant but being consistent through change, clearly, shows character, real character.
What I therefore aspire for, through change, is to be consistent.
That will be the purple patch, a royal purple patch, to hit!
