One day, we were walking our students back to the Farm School from a field trip. We were walking down a new university road that had just been paved, but was not yet open to traffic. One of the boys had his skateboard and asked if he and his friend could try riding down the road’s gentle incline. They sat on the skateboard like two boys on a sled and started coasting down the road. The skateboard started drifting to the left, so they shifted their weight to the right. The skateboard swung around, but by the time they got their weight centered, the skateboard was now heading off to the right, so they leaned to the left. The skateboard swung to the left. As it veered across the “straight-down the road” line that they wanted to go, they shifted too strongly to the right and rolled off the skateboard onto the pavement. They laughingly got up and tried again. Every time the same thing happened. The swinging back and forth got increasingly out of control and within three or four turns, they ended up rolling off the skateboard. The boys weren’t doing something right. Their swerves had a progressive inevitability that for some reason reminded me of the rise and fall of empires.
Several years later, Alysia will have our daughters first play with toy teacups and teapot in the bathtub, because little kids will always overflow their teacups until they learn to stop pouring before their cup is full. There is a time lag between when your brain says “stop pouring” and when water stops entering the teacup – for two reasons. (1) The tilting back of the pitcher takes time. As it tilts back, water is still pouring out though at a slower and slower rate until it finally stops. (2) Even after it stops, water is still dropping down into the cup. Not until all the water that has poured out has fallen into the cup is the cup’s final water level determined. You have to start tilting the pitcher back before the water has reached the level you want in the cup. Getting the timing right is very confusing – which is why Alysia put the pouring toys in the bathtub.
On many winter mornings, I awake before sunrise and there is no frost. The Sun rises. I go out ten minutes later and frost is forming on our car’s windshield. How can it be that the frost forms after the warm Sun rises? Because of the Relative Balance between inflow and outflow of heat. All night, my region has been losing heat into space without any input from the Sun. The temperature drops – almost to freezing. The Sun rises. Warmth starts flowing into my region. But the low-angled sunlight does not bring in as much heat as is still flowing out to space. So the temperature continues to drop. The temperature is going down slower than it was before sunrise, but it is still declining. If it drops below freezing, frost develops. Only when the sunlight comes in at a higher angle that delivers enough heat to overcome the constant heat loss does the temperature start to rise. Even then, frost can continue to form until the Upper Level of temperature rises above freezing. This lag between when the Sun rises and when the temperature rises above freezing is an example of a time lag between the Lower Level of heat flow and its Upper Level Expression of temperature.
When you are out driving or bicycling, notice that every time you make a turn to the right, you start turning your wheels back towards the left, while you are still turning to the right. Why? Think about that. Why do we turn our wheels towards the left in the midst of turning to the right? Why don’t we wait until we have completed our turn, before turning our wheels back towards the left?
Because the turn doesn’t end until the wheels are no longer angled to the right. We have to turn the wheels back towards the left, so that the wheels will be pointed straight ahead at the end of the turn. It’s confusing for the beginning driver (and the two boys on the skateboard). The turning of the steering wheel and the heading of the car are two different things. The beginning driver has to learn to get the timing right between these two things.
Getting the timing right: that is the challenge for the beginning driver and for our daughters pouring water in the bathtub. Getting the timing right is hard because, paradoxically, we have to turn away from our goal in order to achieve our goal. We have to bring our actions in sync with what we are working with. Swinging back and forth on a swing involves a pumping our body forward and a pumping our body backward. But if they aren’t done with the proper pulse, the swing simply jerks about at the lowest point of its potential swing. It’s the same with twirling a rope; there’s a certain pulse to when force is applied to sustain the twirl. Once you have internalized this, twirling becomes easy, but until then, the rope just flops about.
Those two boys on the skateboard swerving ever more out of control weren’t getting their timing right. They didn’t start turning out of their turn until after they had completed their turn, so each turn lasted longer than they wanted. They tried to correct that by leaning in more strongly to make a faster turn, but eventually their weight shift was so extreme they rolled off the skateboard. They needed to turn out sooner rather than turn out stronger. Getting the timing is tricky, especially when it requires coordination between people.
If we can feel the time lag relationship between the cause and the effect within an oscillation and then feel their connection through time, a powerful “3D” effect happens. Rather than depth perception, it’s like that moment you learned to ride a bike. Suddenly, you kinesthetically knew something that had prevented you from staying balanced before, and now you could ride. Just like that. (If you haven’t seen it, here is a link to Smarter Every Day’s Backwards Bicycle that enjoyably demonstrates that moment.)
These skills, simple in retrospect, took us time to feel their “beat” and learn the timing. It’s harder if the skill requires two people in coordination, like the boys on the skateboard, and even harder if it involves an entire culture. It’s also easier to learn the timing if the lag is only a matter of seconds. Time lags of many years are very hard for a culture to learn and coordinate the proper timing with mastery. However, because the world is filled with flows that cultures depend on, the world is also filled with time lags that have crashed cultures throughout history. Empires overextend and then collapse. Forests are over-harvested and recede. Populations over-grow the land’s ability to produce food. Like my daughters in their bathtub, we must somehow learn to change the rates of flow before we reach our goals, if we want to come in balance with our goals. We are like the two boys, trying to learn how to ride the skateboard of civilization. Time after time, we oscillate increasingly out of control and end up on the ground. How do we come to learn the “beat” of these large, slow-to-change systems?
As I explained back in Reflecting, I came away from my encounter with the dance company believing that we can trust the universe to give us accurate feedback by which to navigate our lives. I still believe this – but with some caveats. The first is time lags. Our brains are very attuned to connect cause with effects that follow quickly after. If we place a piece of paper on the table at the same moment that someone drops something with a crash, we instinctively think that placing the paper on the table caused something to crash. Our brains are primed to pair closely sequenced events into a probable cause and effect relationship. But the Upper Level consequences of changing rates of flow are harder to understand because of the time lag in the Upper Level’s response to that change. Cause and effect is still giving accurate feedback but it does not draw our attention. It’s like developing lung cancer twenty years after starting smoking. Time lags are why almost every one of our environmental problems stem from a changed rate of flow that began decades ago. By the time the Upper Level expression of that flow is degrading significantly, a local economy has become established on that re-routed flow and resists giving up its economic benefits.
My rain walks tried to shift the relative balance of how much of the rain soaks in and how much runs off, thereby shifting fields from erosion towards healing. I was interacting with a large area, capable of oscillating, similar to Kiet Siel with its arroyo deepening (water table drops) and filling (water table rises again). Balances shift back and forth like the skateboarders. How do I feel the “beat” of the fields? How do I understand the nature of oscillations? I made a graph of the annual oscillation in daylength because that annual inflow of solar energy shapes so much of our world. I pinned my graph to the wall above my desk and thought about it a lot. I grappled with a paradox.
The two extremes of daylength, the solstices, the shortest and longest days of the year, are also the times of the least change in daylength. The several weeks around the shortest and longest days experience very little change in daylength. (In Denali, the early summer felt like a month of unchanging perpetual daylight.) On the other hand, the times of balance, the spring and fall equinoxes, when day and night are equal, are the times of maximum rate of change in daylength. How can the most balanced points of time between day and night (the equinoxes) be the times of greatest flux while the most unbalanced points of time between day and night (the solstices) be the times of least change? It felt like it should be the other way around.
I explored this paradox by hanging a story upon the graph that emotionally charged it. I imagined the daylength graph as representing some guy’s financial net worth. The part of the graph that rose above 12 hours represented a time of wealth and the part of the curve that dove below 12 hours represented a time of debt. What would the emotional experience of his financial oscillation be?
At spring equinox, he gets free of debt and starts accumulating assets. His wealth accumulates. But as it does, he loses the discipline that got him out of debt. He starts spending more and more. Not as much as he is earning, so his net worth is still growing, but the rate at which his wealth increases slows. There comes a time when his spending grows so out of control that it exceeds his income. At that point (and not until then), his net worth peaks (Summer Solstice). Beyond that point, his net worth starts to decline.
He has accumulated a lot of wealth, however, so he still has easy credit; he can still continue with his loose spending. But his net worth declines faster and faster until he nosedives into debt (Fall Equinox). Easy credit slams shut and interest payments start to mount. As he plunges into debt, he realizes he needs to change his careless ways. He starts tightening his belt, staying on budget, distinguishing between what is absolutely essential and what would be nice. Gradually, he starts narrowing the gap between his income and his overspending so that he is not sliding as fast into greater debt. But as long as that gap exists, his debt does increase. It has to get worse before it gets better.
Time lags influence the Rules of Flow and their Upper Level expressions. It takes time to adjust the Relative Balance so that outflow (expenses) becomes less than inflow (income). After that adjustment, it will then take more time for the Upper Level expression of Wealth to rise out of debt. Change in the Upper Level expression is not instantaneous; it follows later after changes at the lower levels of flow.
Finally he manages to bring his expenses into alignment with his income. That point is the moment of his greatest debt. (Winter Solstice). A bit more discipline and he starts to slowly rise out of debt. As he does, interest payments decline, helping him rise faster and faster and finally (Spring Equinox), he emerges out of debt and can start to accumulate wealth once again.
Like with daylength, there is a paradox. The point of greatest wealth coincides with the period of maximum “moral dissipation,” if you will, while some of the greatest self-sacrifice and discipline occurs down in the depths of debt where the poor soul is being scraped across rock bottom.
Perhaps this is why watching my two skateboarding students oscillate and crash time and time again felt like the rises and falls of empires throughout human history. We are still trying to learn how to ride this thing we call “civilization” and we haven’t gotten the timing right yet. We strive for mansions that resemble the Roman Empire at its peak, but Rome’s peak was not Rome at its greatest. That peak represents that point in time when the “rot” became so great that it overcame whatever was originally good about the Roman Republic and started their culture downward. That’s what defines a peak: the moment at which the system starts down. Rome’s strength was earlier, during the times when civic-minded virtues were shaping a rising republic. Empires, unfortunately, don’t want to turn out of their upward turn while they are still going up, so they go too far, they overextend … and then they collapse. Getting the timing right requires learning to turn away from your goal before reaching it. We can’t wait for “leaders” to decide to turn away; we have to start the turn on our own.
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