The Rhythm of Life

When we speak of rhythm, we naturally think of music. Yet the Earth’s rotation around the sun, the moon’s journey around the Earth, the seasons, the tides, life itself all follow rhythms. Humanity has felt the need to measure and name these rhythms: 365 days, 3 months, 4 weeks, 7 days, 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. Human beings have always wanted to control time, but these few numbers and words scribbled onto parchment will never change reality: we are the slaves of time and its rhythms.

Let us speak of what we can see: nature. In spring, the days grow longer and the sun becomes more present. It first begins to warm our hearts, numbed by winter, and then our bodies. The air itself becomes gentler. The first flowers and the first buds appear. Then comes summer with its abundance of scents and colours, where the sun bathes all things, people and plants in its light. Autumn, for its part, announces rest for this nourishing earth. It offers us an abundance of shimmering colours before taking its leave and making way for winter. It allows Mother Nature to rest. Winter is cold, usually grey, yet it is also the craftsman of magnificent landscapes and allows summer to shine upon another part of our world.

The tides: under the influence of the moon, our oceans come to kiss the shores or retreat almost as far as the horizon itself. In a recurring ballet, waves break upon the beaches in clouds of foam. During equinoctial tides, they swell and grow, advancing at the pace of a galloping horse and imposing themselves as walls of water crashing far beyond the beaches and into the land.

Life, our life, is governed by time. We have an expiry date. We are born, we live and we die. The nine months spent in our mother’s womb are set to the rhythm of her heartbeat. We enter the world and, for almost two years, our parents live according to the rhythm of bottles, nappies and our tears, all in addition to the rhythm of their own lives. The years pass: nursery school, primary school, secondary school, high school, university for some. All these years spent under the influence of time. It is not likely to let us go anytime soon. Working, earning a living, racing through life, finding pleasure, catching those fragments, those precious moments we call happiness. Then, from one day to the next, the endless race comes to an end: retirement. The hours still fly by, but differently. We must give a new rhythm to our days ourselves and find activities to fill the emptiness left by the end of working life. Since childhood we have been conditioned; we must learn to free ourselves from it. The third age, the fourth age — more formulas created to regulate time and its rhythm. The hourglass continues to empty, grain by grain marking our ending, the end of our lives. A definitive end for some, the promise of reincarnation for others, a doorway into the unknown.

Our ancestors, ourselves and our children have lived and will live according to the rhythm of life, as will every being and plant upon our dear old Earth. I wish you a beautiful life, one filled with joys and happiness, offered by our ability to defy time. I bid you farewell and — now then! A song is running through my mind: “And I sing, sing, this tune that I love, and you dance, dance…”