Cycle Repeats Itself Quotes

She’s a manner of speaking. Even the flowers don’t come back, or the green leaves. There are new flowers, new green leaves. There are other beautiful days. Nothing comes back, nothing repeats itself, because everything is real.

Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself.

So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Being in a continual attitude of rejoicing is the entrance into prayer. Being grateful and filled with thanksgiving is how we come out of it. Then the cycle repeats itself—immediately.

Grimm: Cat and Mouse (#1.18)" (2012) Edgar Waltz: You may think I'm a monster, but what I am is necessary. No society would survive without order. Free thought is not free. There's no such thing as revolution. The oppressed always become the oppressors and the cycle repeats itself over and over. The only way to win is to stay out of the cycle. You don't understand a word that I've been saying. Rosalee Calvert: I'm sorry. I wasn't listening.

Humans are capable of so much more. Power mongers like you have stripped away what is most valuable to us, the importance of our heritage and family values. We have been robbed of this, blinded by your authority, while you encourage us to burry ourselves in debt and rely on our corrupt governments. Men and women around the world have been forced to work long hours to keep up with inflated debts, all the while abandoning the families they struggle to support. History repeats, and repeats. It’s time to break the cycle and start anew.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.

Since the dawn of man, there have always been people bent on harming others. There have been periods of peace and enlightenment, and there have been dark times, but through it all, mankind survived. That cycle has repeated itself over and over. It wasn’t always easy, and despite those who would have it otherwise, life went on.

A phrase (it often happened when he was exhausted) kept cycling round and round, preconsicously, just under the threshold of lip and tongue movement: “Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.” It repeated itself automatically and Stencil improved upon on it each time, placing emphasis on different words—“events seem”; “seem to be ordered”; “ominous logic”—pronouncing them differently, changing the “tone of voice” from sepulchral to jaunty: round and round and round. Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.

The cycle repeated itself at inconsistent intervals, creating invisible eddies that brushed against him like fountains of roiling water.

Hidden emotional abuse is regular and repeated, always denied, and never resolved. An emotionally abusive man isn’t remorseful or sad for the damage he has caused his wife. Instead he denies, minimizes, or justifies his behavior, or he blames his target for it. This cycle repeats itself over and over again—a never ending merry-go-round of crazy-making pain with no end in sight.

Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly. For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again. Politicians do not know they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycle of time. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again. Lovers making love the first time undress shyly, show surprise at the supple thigh, the fragile nipple. How would they know that each secret glimpse, each touch will be repeated again and again and again, exactly as before?

Many of us learned these things because when we were children, someone very important to us was unable to give us the love, approval, and emotional security we needed. So we’ve gone about our lives the best way we could, still looking vaguely or desperately for something we never got. Some of us are still beating our heads against the cement trying to get this love from people who, like Mother or Father, are unable to give what we need. The cycle repeats itself until it is interrupted and stopped. It’s called unfinished business.

The truth is, it is the younger inexperience gangsters who often cut down the older original gangsters. The best way for this young thug to prove himself to others, is to simply cut down an established gangster. Thus, this cruel cycle of senseless violence repeats itself, with the younger being more vicious and rootless than his predecessor. It’s the dog, who kills the lion, and once he has killed the lion, he’s no longer a dog; he’s now a lion himself.

are experts at taking care of everybody around us, do we doubt our ability to take care of ourselves? What is it about us? Many of us learned these things because when we were children, someone very important to us was unable to give us the love, approval, and emotional security we needed. So we’ve gone about our lives the best way we could, still looking vaguely or desperately for something we never got. Some of us are still beating our heads against the cement trying to get this love from people who, like Mother or Father, are unable to give what we need. The cycle repeats itself until it is interrupted and stopped. It’s called unfinished business.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself, in every points

I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and set fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn’t see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others. I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love.

Before he lets me go, he tells me what life looks like. "There's the walk into battle. The battle itself. And the walk away." It's a cycle we repeat. Every day. Sometimes it's over small stuff. Sometimes it's life and death.

My period continued, an inevitable cycle, yet every month I was somehow surprised by the violent pain. It was as if I refused to believe my body, something I’d trusted for years, would repeatedly betray me. My stomach ate itself from the inside, a revelry I had been dragged to, a feast I was forced to join though I was not hungry. The meal lasted four to six days, gorging on cramps, the spilled crumbs falling out of me stained with raspberry jam. My stomach was never a clean eater, gnawing on my uterus and fallopian tubes, leaving bite marks. I counted each rotation of the sun with heightening anxiety until it passed and I reset the clock. The knife carved my insides into pot roasts; the fork jabbed my sides into holey cheese. I could distinguish each fork prong—the pain was profound. My guts twisted around the spoon like spaghetti, tangled noodles slathered in scarlet marinara. Menstruation was more smashed acidic tomatoes than sweet fruit compote. I wiped my fingers on white jeans made of napkins and left streaks dried to rust. The stains came out with bleach and detergent. I died and regenerated every month. How else could I define the experience? The reasonable explanation was death. I decided when my body was wheeled into the morgue, the coroner would declare I died of being a woman. Which was far better than dying of being a man.

... an ever-recurring cycle, a cycle which, repeating itself silently and ceaselessly, ensures the continuation of living matter. This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay. An eastern religion calls this cycle the Wheel of Life and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supercedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.

From experience in the past we create memories, which are the basis of imagination and desire. Desire is the basis of action, once again. And so the cycle perpetuates itself. In Vedic tradition and in Buddhism this cycle is known as the Wheel of Samsara, the basis of earthly existence.That’s why, if you really want to break out of the mundane, you must learn to think and dream the impossible. Only with repeated thoughts can the impossible be made possible through the intention of the nonlocal mind.

James is a nice guy. But he tends to be needy in his relationships and has what we would call a high level of investment with any woman that he meets. Whenever he dates a woman, he will rearrange his entire schedule at her whim. He will buy her gifts and spend most of his paycheck on the nicest dinners for her. He’ll forgo plans with his guy friends and if the woman he dates gets angry, he’ll sit patiently and listen to her vent all of her frustrations to him, agreeing with her constantly in a futile desperation that she may feel better. Even when he feels that she’s being irrational or treating him unfairly, he won’t say anything because he doesn’t want her to be upset with him. As a result, despite caring for him, James’s girlfriends rarely respect him. And sooner or later — usually sooner — they dump him. When James gets dumped, he becomes distraught and depressed. He’s often inconsolable and drinks too much. Usually, he doesn’t feel better again until he meets another woman and the entire cycle repeats itself.

How can I escape the same fate? In a world that seems filled with fear and panic, what can I do to stop the cycle repeating itself? Do I carry that same fragility in my own genetic make-up? Am I helpless, or is it possible for me to retake control of my life?

Sometimes the same negative patterns are happening in our lives because we keep thinking the same negative thoughts. The pattern and the cycle repeat itself until we break it by replacing our negative thoughts, beliefs and faith with more positive hopeful ones.

It occurred to me that human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

Obstructive Sleep Apnea — When you have obstructive sleep apnea, you stop breathing for seconds or even minutes while you are sleeping. Usually, you stop each episode by snorting or coughing yourself awake. The cycle can repeat itself five to 30 times per hour throughout the night.

The reason for the great number and variety of Old European images lies in the fact that this symbolism is lunar and chthonic, built around the understanding that life is in eternal transformation, in constant and rhythmic change between creation and destruction, birth and death. The moon's three phases-new, waxing, and old-are repeated in trinities or triple function deities that recall these moon phases; maiden, nymph, and crone; life-giving, death-giving, and transformational; rising, dying, and self-renewing. Life-givers are also death-wielders. Immortality is secured through the innate forces of regeneration within Nature itself. The concept of regeneration and renewal is perhaps the most outstanding and dramatic theme we perceive in this symbolism. It seems more appropriate to view all of these Goddess images as aspects of the one Great Goddess with her core functions-life-giving, death-wielding, regeneration, and renewal. The obvious analogy would be to Nature itself; through the multiplicity of phenomena and continuing cycles of which it is made, one recognizes the fundamental and underlying unity of Nature. The Goddess is immanent rather than transcendent and therefore physically manifest.

Yes. You’re both happy,” I answered, knowing nothing. “You’re both happy, Ma. Yes,” I said again. Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?

Every morning I wake up to have the same hope, that mankind had survived its own greed, its own desire to self-destruct, its own monopoly to destroy the environment regardless of the consequences, its own religious and ideological dogma that kept it in turmoil since inception….I listen to the morning news to find out that nothing had changed, and realize more certainly that we are living on a barrowed time, and sometime in the future, if we wake up there will be fewer and fewer of us who will wonder but never learn what went wrong….this is human history, keep repeating itself in destruction, greed and chaos, at the best of times it is organized chaos….and at the worst of time it is mayhem, all to serve the few….who leaves crumbs for us to continue the cycle…

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors.

In reality, we don’t die, but merely change. Energy reveals and hides itself repeatedly as it flows along. The flame of life flickers on and off, again and again. How could the flame going out for a brief time signify extinction? There is no life and death separate from the infinite life energy of the cosmos. The phenomena of life energy merely change and cycle in accordance with the law of infinite energy.

Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself. For time is but an abstraction from the successive-ness of events that pass; and since all events whatsoever form together a cycle of successive-ness, there is nothing constant in relation to which there can be repetition. And so the succession of events is cyclic, yet not repetitive. The birth of the all-pervading gas in the so-called Beginning is not merely similar to another such birth to occur long after us and long after the cosmic End, so-called; the past Beginning is the future Beginning. When we are in full possession of our faculties, we are not distressed by this fate. For we know that though our fair community must cease, it has also indestructible being. We have at least carved into one region of the eternal real a form which has beauty of no mean order.

It doesn’t take many people to lead a nation in a direction that has serious repercussions on the liberty of others. Indeed, most will agree that we have already given up liberties for various reasons, and we may never get them back. Under certain circumstances, things can take a very bad turn very rapidly. This cycle has repeated itself with many societies throughout history. Despite the solid foundation of our culture and political system, America is not immune.

The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a static quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self, and comparable to the carbon-nitrogen cycle in the sun, when a carbon nucleus captures four protons (two of which immediately become neutrons) and releases them at the end of the cycle in the form of an alpha particle. The carbon nucleus itself comes out of the reaction unchanged, “like the Phoenix from the ashes.”108 The secret of existence, i.e., the existence of the atom and its components, may well consist in a continually repeated process of rejuvenation, and one comes to similar conclusions in trying to account for the numinosity of the archetypes.

With the thinnest possible layer of glass, we find that the number of photons arriving at A is nearly always zero-sometimes it's like 1. When we replace the thinnest layer with a slightly thicker one, we find that the amount of light reflected is higher-closer to the expected 8%. After a few more replacements the count of photons arriving at A increases past the 8% mark. As we continue to substitute still "thicker " layers of glass-we're up to about 5 millionths of an inch now-the amount of light reflected by the two surfaces reaches a maximum of 16%, and then goes down, through 8%, back to zero-if the layer of glass is just the right thickness, there is no reflection at all. (Do that with spots!) With gradually thicker and thicker layers of glass, partial reflection again increases to 16% and returns to zero-a cycle that repeats itself again and again(see Fig. 5). Newton discovered these oscillations and did one experiment that could be correctly interpreted only if the oscillations continued for 34,000 cycles! Today, with lasers (which produce a very pure, monochromatic light), we can see this cycle still going strong after more than 100,000,000 repetitions-which corresponds to glass that is more than 50 meters thick. (We don't see this phenomenon every day because the light source is normally not monochromatic.) So it turns out that our prediction of 8% is right as an overall average (since the actual amount varies in a regular pattern from zero to 16%), but it's exactly right only twice each cycle-like a stopped clock (which is right twice a day).

I added new fields to the database, with the calculations your colleague applied to the data. Now we are able to see the result as soon as I have put the raw data into the record,” Raj was saying. As he typed, a dizzying array of numbers in rows and columns marched across the screen. A few more keystrokes, and the data arranged itself into a chart, showing the final calculation in colored numbers. Sarah and Daniel looked closer, to notice that the different colors always represented the same number, red for five, green for eight, and so on. The sequences, clearly Fibonacci numbers, went no higher than thirty-four. “How many of these blocks have you finished, Raj?” Daniel asked. “All of them in the passageway, both sides.” “And yet, not counting zero or the repeated one, we have only eight numbers, the highest being thirty-four. Could we have been mistaken about the message? It doesn’t seem like enough.

And yet, not counting zero or the repeated one, we have only eight numbers, the highest being thirty-four. Could we have been mistaken about the message? It doesn’t seem like enough.” Raj said, “You know, it looks like we have discovered the keyboard and the screen of a computer, but where is the computer?” Daniel and Sarah saw it almost at the same time, but Sarah found her voice first. “That’s it, it’s a sign, but it’s only pointing to the alphabet, it isn’t the alphabet itself.” “Why do you say that?” Raj asked. “Because, there aren’t enough letters, if we assign a letter to each number. No alphabet has so few.

But the contradiction remains and the cycle repeats itself: the capital investment needed to raise productivity through innovation means constant capital grows relative to variable capital and also, therefore, the surplus value produced by variable capital. Surplus value is converted into capital faster than it is produced and so capital once again over-accumulates. And because the overall mass of capital is now even greater than before, an even greater magnitude of surplus value is required alongside an even greater devaluation of capital in order to reproduce and expand it yet further. Crisis is therefore inherent to the system, as increasing magnitudes of capital become dormant while waiting for profitable conditions to return, and cannot be put down merely to ‘greed’, hoarding or the ‘bad’ or ‘erroneous choices’ of capitalists, politicians, economists and civil servants. Private and public debt rises not because of arbitrary overspending but in order to make up for the insufficient production of surplus value.

History was a cycle. Everything that had happened before, all the way back through the generations, would happen again. Sometimes the wheel turned quickly, sometimes it was slow. She could see it like a feed gear, all teeth and bearings with her on the rim along with everybody else. Her last thought before forgetfulness took her and she fell deeply into slumber was that even with the gates, nothing really ever changed so much as repeated itself, over and over, with all new people, forever.

My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those world and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that's inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others.

The recent history of human population dynamics resembles the ‘boom-bust’ cycle of any other species introduced to a new habitat with abundant resources and no predators, therefore little negative feedback. [...] The population expands rapidly (exponentially), until it depletes essential resources and pollutes its habitat. Negative feedback (overcrowding, disease, starvation, resource scarcity/competition/conflict) then reasserts itself and the population crashes to a level at or below theoretical carrying capacity (it may go locally extinct). Some species populations, in simple habitats, cycle repeatedly through boom and bust phases. The height of the boom is called the ‘plague phase’ of such cycles. Hypothesis: Homo sapiens are currently approaching the peak of the plague phase of a one-off global population cycle and will crash because of depleted resources, habitat deterioration and psycho-social feedback, including possible war over remaining ‘assets,’ sometime in this century. (“But wait,” I hear you protest. “Humans are not just any other species. We’re smarter; we can plan ahead; we just won’t let this happen!” Perhaps, but what is the evidence so far that our leaders even recognize the problem?) [...] climate change is not the only existential threat confronting modern society. Indeed, we could initiate any number of conversations that end with the self-induced implosion of civilization and the loss of 50 per cent or even 90 per cent of humanity. And that places the global community in a particularly embarrassing predicament. Homo sapiens, that self-proclaimed most-intelligent-of-species, is facing a genuine, unprecedented, hydra-like ecological crisis, yet its political leaders, economic elites and sundry other messiahs of hope will not countenance a serious conversation about of any of its ghoulish heads. Climate change is perhaps the most aggressively visible head, yet despite decades of high-level talks — 33 in al — and several international agreements to turn things around, atmospheric CO2 and other GHG concentrations have more than doubled to over 37 billion tonnes and, with other GHG concentrations, are still rising at record rates.

The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it, so they diversify by spreading it across a portfolio of institutional investors. • Institutional investors don’t know what to do with their managed capital, so they diversify by amassing a portfolio of stocks. • Companies try to increase their share price by generating free cash flows. If they do, they issue dividends or buy back shares and the cycle repeats. At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.

Subnormal stimuli like high-calorie foods are heightened versions of the stimuli that were programmed into our brains long before we had regular access to those foods. 2.​A dopamine feedback loop occurs when a reward is achieved, triggering the craving. After the first cycle, we release more dopamine from anticipation than from the reward itself, reinforcing the behavior. 3.​Temptation bundling means pairing a necessary activity with a likable one. For example,  listening to your favorite podcast ONLY while cleaning makes the cleaning seem much more appealing. Questions to Guide the Reader 1.​If you want to start a running regimen, how can you use temptation bundling to make a habit easier to repeat? 2.​Do we lose our cravings after achieving the goal and receiving the reward?

Part 3: The Between; Chapter 16: The Weight Nate realized that he lacked the time he'd need to scrutinize a dozen plus pages at the moment ‒ nor had he spotted an available pen ‒ but his curiosity got the better of him. So he settled down upon his usual barstool to begin anyway. Introduction: The Burden When the blossom of a dream is given an opportunity to thrive, it embraces the sunshine and rain with equal fervor ‒ while reveling in the chorus sung by spring songbirds celebrating its promise. Yet if it perseveres, this budding creation ultimately matures into a far weightier burden. Like an apple tree whose branches droop ever noticeably amidst the season's wane; or as an expectant mother waddles and shuffles with increasing effort toward the looming moments in which she is fated to deliver new life; nurturing a fanciful idea to fruition will ultimately transform into a progressively more dutiful task ‒ with sporadic flashes of lightning which recall its genesis as a splendidly creative one. As with any labor of love, it is this toil which brings it meaning. That which has been created then ushers forward, towards its own purpose ‒ as its creator proceeds anew. Thus the act of willful creation itself revolves within a perpetual cycle of collaborative nascence. Likewise all stories are tragedies ‒ authored in sweat; in tears and in blood ‒ yet each begins long before its introduction and will too continue beyond its final page. Just as the same sun which illuminates every voyager’s pathway has unfailingly risen and set in the breaking dawns and dusks of ere will assuredly repeat its ritual ergo. Perhaps this helps to shed light on why fairy tales so often begin and end with abstractions. Once upon a time's are merely chosen moments in which their telling resumes while Happily ever after's offer a cheerful auger of adventures hence ‒ a yet told volume patiently awaiting beyond its transitory resolution. If but a single teller of a solitary story endeavored to detail all which precedes, or proceeds from it; there would not be enough paper upon this earth to document those efforts. More so, the "before" after its "after" must likewise persevere this same mix of happy and unhappy realities which give rise to the conflicts that imbue each story with its purpose. This lack of adventure ‒ rather than any presumptions of finality ‒ best embodies the rationale as to why no tale ever begins with such promises of everlasting bliss. Where there is no wretchedness to inspire tension, neither can a hero or heroine arise to prevail over it, or to ‒ at barest minimum ‒ make a courageous effort in its failure.

Nate realized that he lacked the time he'd need to scrutinize a dozen plus pages at the moment ‒ nor had he spotted an available pen ‒ but his curiosity got the better of him. So he settled down upon his usual barstool to begin anyway. Introduction: The Burden When the blossom of a dream is given an opportunity to thrive, it embraces the sunshine and rain with equal fervor ‒ while reveling in the chorus [sung by] of spring songbirds celebrating its promise. Yet if it perseveres, this budding creation ultimately matures into a far weightier burden. Like an apple tree whose branches droop ever noticeably amidst the season's wane; or as an expectant mother waddles and shuffles with increasing effort toward the looming moments in which she is fated to deliver new life; nurturing a fanciful idea to fruition will ultimately transform into a progressively more dutiful task ‒ with sporadic flashes of lightning which recall its genesis as a splendidly creative one. As with any labor of love, it is this toil which brings it meaning. That which has been created then ushers forward, towards its own purpose ‒ as its creator proceeds anew. Thus the act of willful creation itself revolves within a perpetual cycle of collaborative nascence. Likewise all stories are tragedies ‒ authored in sweat; in tears and in blood ‒ yet each begins long before its introduction and will too continue beyond its final page. Just as the same sun which illuminates every voyager’s pathway has unfailingly risen and set in the breaking dawns and dusks of ere will assuredly repeat its ritual ergo. Perhaps this helps to shed light on why fairy tales so often begin and end with abstractions. Once upon a time's are merely chosen moments in which their telling resumes while Happily ever after's offer a cheerful auger of adventures hence ‒ a yet told volume patiently awaiting beyond its transitory resolution. If but a single teller of a solitary story endeavored to detail all which precedes, or proceeds from it; there would not be enough paper upon this earth to document those efforts. More so, the "before" after its "after" must likewise persevere this same mix of happy and unhappy realities which give rise to the conflicts that imbue each story with its purpose. This lack of adventure ‒ rather than any presumptions of finality ‒ best embodies the rationale as to why no tale ever begin with such promises of everlasting bliss. Where there is no wretchedness to inspire tension, neither can a hero or heroine arise to prevail over it, or to ‒ at barest minimum ‒ make a courageous effort in its failure. Similarly without rot there will be no renewal and absent sorrow one cannot find solace.

Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous Cycle Sketching out feedback loops is very useful when approaching a systems thinking model. For example, I often see the cycle occurring in Figure 20.1. Figure 20.1 The vicious cycle of distrust This vicious cycle increases distrust between management and development as each side games the other to protect itself. Less work gets done, and quality suffers. A significant role of leadership is to identify these vicious cycles and find ways to turn them into virtuous cycles. We do this by changing the vicious cycle of distrust into a virtuous cycle of trust. The greatest opportunity to begin this is in the Sprint Planning and Review meetings and to reinforce it during the Sprint.

This pattern keeps repeating itself: murders happen, the murderer is caught and confined. They are never successfully rehabilitated, none have ever admitted to remembering or consciously committing any of the murders. The murders stop happening while they are confined, but once they die, within one to one-and-a half cycles, it starts happening again.

Even if the cat knocks into it, a pendulum clock does not switch to a sixty-two–second minute. Turbulence in a fluid was a behavior of a different order, never producing any single rhythm to the exclusion of others. A well-known characteristic of turbulence was that the whole broad spectrum of possible cycles was present at once. Turbulence is like white noise, or static. Could such a thing arise from a simple, deterministic system of equations? Ruelle and Takens wondered whether some other kind of attractor could have the right set of properties. Stable—representing the final state of a dynamical system in a noisy world. Low-dimensional—an orbit in a phase space that might be a rectangle or a box, with just a few degrees of freedom. Nonperiodic—never repeating itself, and never falling into a steady grandfather-clock rhythm. Geometrically the question was a puzzle: What kind of orbit could be drawn in a limited space so that it would never repeat itself and never cross itself—because once a system returns to a state it has been in before, it thereafter must follow the same path. To produce every rhythm, the orbit would have to be an infinitely long line in a finite area. In other words—but the word had not been invented—it would have to be fractal.

The strange attractor lives in phase space, one of the most powerful inventions of modern science. Phase space gives a way of turning numbers into pictures, abstracting every bit of essential information from a system of moving parts, mechanical or fluid, and making a flexible road map to all its possibilities. Physicists already worked with two simpler kinds of “attractors”: fixed points and limit cycles, representing behavior that reached a steady state or repeated itself continuously.

I grew up in a world of violence, but I myself was never violent at all. Yes, I played pranks and seen fires and broke windows, but I never attacked people. I never hit anyone. I was never angry. I just didn't see myself that way. My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, thee cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that's inflicted on people that they. in turn inflict on others. I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and thee things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. After that, she never raised her hand to her children again.

You of the west,' Malik said, 'think of time moving in a straight line, from past to present to future. You eastern brothers regard time as a circle, returning endlessly in a cycle of decay and rebirth. Both ideas have a dimension of the truth. If you were to combine geometrically the movement of the circle with the movement of the line, what would you have?' He snapped his mouth shut and peered at me with an uncanny resemblance to my old schoolmaster. 'The spiral?' I ventured. 'Yes, yes. Or the helix. They are our models of the passage of time.' he said. 'So time moves on, but history repeats itself.' 'Precisely,' he said

Traumatized people tend to traumatize others. Those who blame tend to feel like victims which teaches others to be in blame with them. Those who are prideful tend to be hiding insecurity and try to make others feel insecure. Hurt people passing on hurt to others thus teaching them to repeat the behavior. And the innocent cycle of ignorance begetting ignorance goes on and on. The mind naively puts itself into a self-imposed prison of repeating cycles of suffering and confusion. Compassion for ourselves and others becomes natural when we see how this all works.

Time and again, history has proved a very bad predictor of future events. This is because history never repeats itself; nothing in human society…ever happens twice under exactly the same conditions or in exactly the same way.17 So it is also with earthquakes. There are no cycles, no warnings, no signals, no precursors. The Earth starts shaking whenever it wants to.

During the short time they’d lived together, they’d had rather a lot of serious talks, and the format had always been the same. She’d start with a speech-cum-lecture-cum-list-of-charges and he’d sit still and be quiet, trying not to let his attention wander; then there’d be an awkward silence, and then she’d start talking again, usually saying the same things but in a slightly different order. The cycle would repeat itself (rarely more than five times), and at the end either she’d burst into tears and stomp out of the room, lose her temper and stomp out of the room or sit on his lap and start nibbling his ear.

In the beginning, there was a rapid expansion of a Singularity. Around 380,000 years later, there was light. There was also hydrogen and helium and four stable, fundamental forces of physics. Atoms and those forces worked together to birth the first stars from massive clouds of gas, and those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died in explosions that spread their matter across the sky in clouds of gas and dust—now with heavier elements than what existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies. As the cycle repeated, heavier elements formed planets orbiting those stars, emerging from disks of gas and dust like dust bunnies under your bed. In our universe, planets can exist only because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. The rebirth of stellar matter into planets is how our Earth came to be. This planet, our home, is covered with a film of life unlike any we’ve yet seen anywhere else in the universe. As far as we know today, it is unique. A blue marble floating in the dark. Earth’s life is fed by a process in which carbon from the air and minerals in the soil are attached together by the energy of photons via photosynthesis in plants. In this process, everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice of the nearest star. Every blade of grass, every tree, every bush, every microscopic algae on this planet is a resurrected form of the Sun’s energy. I capture that energy by consuming other things that have died. Every time I eat a meal, the dead matter that made those plants and animals literally gives life to my body through digestion and my metabolism. One day, I will die, and in time my atoms will go back to giving life to something else. Much farther along the arrow of time, our own Sun will explode and spread its essence across the sky. Our Sun’s dust will meet with other stars’ remnants and form new stars and planets of their own. The universe itself exists in an eternal pattern of life, death, and resurrection.

hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.

Polybius studied the histories of Greco-Roman city-states and noticed a recurring progression of political regimes—from kingship to aristocracy to democracy to anarchy —from which a new kingship would emerge. This progression itself was nothing new: Plato and Aristotle had said something similar. But Polybius went further. He specifically linked it to a pattern of generational succession. In his view, the city-states' first kings are generally powerful and good, but their children so weak and corrupt that an aristocratic rebellion eventually arises among the children's peers. The founding aristocrats govern well enough, but their children sink to oligarchy, prompting a democratic rebellion among their peers. A generation afterwards, the initial democrats' children sink to a mob rule ochlocracy, leading to a state of anarchy. In due course, a new king seizes control, and the cycle repeats. Polybius never says how long it takes for this sequence to occur. Apparently, it could occur slowly, over a period of many centuries—or rapidly, over the course of one saeculum (four generations).

There are recurring cycles, ups and downs, but the course of events is essentially the same, with small variations. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.

The discovery of synchronized chaos also enriched our understanding of sync itself. In the past, sync had always been associated with rhythmicity. The two concepts are so tightly linked that it’s easy to overlook the distinction between them. Rhythmicity means that something repeats its behavior at regular time intervals; sync means that two things happen simultaneously. The confusion occurs because many synchronous phenomena are rhythmic as well. Synchronous fireflies not only flash in unison, they also flash periodically, at fixed intervals. Cardiac pacemaker cells fire in step, and at a constant rate. The moon turns once as it orbits Earth; both its spin and its orbit follow cycles that repeat themselves regularly.

Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth. [...] If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel. [...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home. [...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation. [...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now. On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.

The Human Heart CONSIDER, FOR example, the human heart and its accompanying circulatory system. The human heart is vastly superior to any human artifact. Every second it undergoes a cycle of contraction and expansion, and beats continually and faithfully for the duration of a human lifetime. It starts beating in the womb and in eighty years will beat about two billion times. The cardiac muscle itself consists of an interconnected syncytium of billions of muscle cells specially adapted to resist fatigue and contract autonomously without external activation or control. Within the cardiac muscle cells there are trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments whose regular rhythmic lengthening and shortening generate the cardiac cycle. At rest each of us needs about a fourth a liter of oxygen per minute to satisfy our energy needs.30 This involves the movement every minute of one hundred trillion oxygen molecules across every square millimeter of the alveolar surface of the lungs. And with every contraction the heart pumps one hundred billion red blood cells through hundreds of kilometers of tiny capillaries.31 Coursing through the capillaries in the lungs, each of these tiny nano-machines carries one billion molecules of oxygen (O2) from the lungs to the tissues, each loosely bound to an iron atom in the hemoglobin. By the heart’s unceasing activity it ensures a bountiful supply of oxygen to provide us with the vital energy of life. The red cells themselves, no less than the heart, are also miracles of bioengineering. During its 120-day lifetime in the circulatory system, each red cell makes hundreds of thousands of circuits, covering hundreds of miles. It is only because the red cell membranes are uniquely soft and strong—one hundred times softer than a latex membrane of comparable thickness but stronger than steel32—that they can withstand these repeated deformations as they squeeze though the smallest capillaries, which in many cases have a diameter of five microns, almost half the diameter of the average red blood cell.

we come to a change in artistic structure. The thing is no longer a string of incidents; it is a cycle of incidents. It returns upon itself; it has recurrent melody and poetic justice; it has artistic constancy and artistic revenge. It preserves the unities; even to some extent it preserves the unities of time and place. The story circles round two or three symbolic places; it does not go straggling irregularly all over England like one of Mr. Pickwick’s coaches. People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else. If there is ultimately any crisis or serious subject-matter of David Copperfield, it is the marred marriage with Dora, the final return to Agnes; and all this is in no way involved in the highly-amusing fact that his aunt expected him to be a girl. We may repeat that the matter is picaresque. The story begins in one place and ends in another place, and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end except a biographical connection.

Current assets are also referred to as the “working assets” of the business because they are in the cycle of cash going to buy inventory; Inventory is then sold to vendors and becomes Accounts Receivable. Accounts Receivable, when collected from the vendors, then turns back into Cash. Cash → Inventory → Accounts Receivable → Cash. This cycle repeats itself over and over again, and it is how a business makes money.

City leaders pour resources into beautiful spectacles for political reasons, rather than providing good roads, functioning sewers, relatively safe marketplaces, and other basic amenities of urban life. As a result, cities may look awe-inspiring but aren't particularly resilient against disasters like storm floods and drought. And the more a city suffers from the onslaughts of nature, the more contentious its political situation becomes. Then it's even harder to repair shattered dams and homes. This vicious cycle has haunted cities for as long as they've existed. Sometimes the cycle ends with urban revitalization, but often it ends in death.

The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle.

James is a nice guy. But he tends to be needy in his relationships and has what we would call a high level of investment with any woman that he meets. Whenever he dates a woman, he will rearrange his entire schedule at her whim. He will buy her gifts and spend most of his paycheck on the nicest dinners for her. He’ll forgo plans with his guy friends and if the woman he dates gets angry, he’ll sit patiently and listen to her vent all of her frustrations to him, agreeing with her constantly in a futile desperation that she may feel better. Even when he feels that she’s being irrational or treating him unfairly, he won’t say anything because he doesn’t want her to be upset with him. As a result, despite caring for him, James’s girlfriends rarely respect him. And sooner or later — usually sooner — they dump him. When James gets dumped, he becomes distraught and depressed. He’s often inconsolable and drinks too much. Usually, he doesn’t feel better again until he meets another woman and the entire cycle repeats itself.

Each generation is like one of nature’s seasons, repeating itself in endless cycles. It’s an eternal rebirth starting with spring, when everything seems solid and unmovable and people think things will always be like that. Then with summer a new generation awakens and turns everything on its head. Their provocative creativity questions all established notions, and then their heyday gives way to autumn. The next generation rediscovers individualism and the human capacity to achieve personal goals, but they neglect the social fabric until the most dangerous and destructive generation shows up. The winter generation exists in a seemingly unprecedented social crisis; it’s marked by mass confusion and the complete destruction of all that seemed solid.