TROPISM

“Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding.”

Ursula K. LeGuin

Perhaps I am coining a word when I use “chronotropism” to refer to a response an individual makes to the passage of time. The word “tropism” is defined as “the responsive growth or movement of an organism toward or away from an external stimulus.” The word is derived from the Greek word for turn or turning. In biology, there are a number of tropisms related to how plants respond to the environmental conditions, including sunshine, water, and even the proximity of other plants and non-sentient beings (think rocks). At its base is the idea of process, of adaptation, of resilience. Process and progress.

Chronotropism came to mind as I was thinking about how our lives are played out within the progress of time. If we move at all, we are acting in a stream of time. If we engage in recalling memories, we are within the envelope of time. And just at this time of year, the last day of one year on the cusp of a new one, I am thinking about how we express it as the “turn” of a new year. And it is a tropism in its own way, is it not? Our minds are turning towards the future and away from the year (actually the moment) just passing away. We are always in the stream of time, always turning, always moving in ways that are responses to the stimuli of life as we live it on a daily basis.

A recent article on the management of time as it relates to one's organic circadian rhythms also plays into this consideration of chronotropism. The article was directed at the young and restless who hold jobs and are developing their lives in ways that now drift away from older people, such as me. The article had all the jargon associated with the business/work world. There were references to productivity and efficiency and maximizing effort. There were suggestions about timing one's activities to match in some more harmonious way the rhythms of the body. For instance, it was suggested that one experiment with the time of day to see how certain periods allowed for sharper focus for more demanding work and other periods when such work would constitute mental overload. It is in these latter periods that one might engage right brain activities or even participate in some physical activity.

It seems to me that human biology has its built in circadian rhythms that relate to neurochemical balances and that these effects will be operative no matter what one's intentions are to overcome them. But having said that, it is useful to think about the times of day, the energy stores, wakefulness/sleepiness, and to make an effort to pace oneself within those innate biological constraints. After all, the body requires the miracle of sleep in a variety of manifestations in order to maintain robust health. This is true no matter how one might shave off hours from sleep in the hope of becoming more “efficient.” There are limits to what we can manage by intention alone.

When I think about chronotropism, I imagine that the tasks of the day, including all uninvited distractions and interruptions, are the stimuli that cause us to respond. The definition above states that the stimuli cause movement or growth in the organism and the metaphor of tropism the way I am using it also applies to how we respond to the stimuli we experience in the course of our daily stream of time. I suppose that all stimuli are not of equal potency for plants responding to their external forces and that there are some that are, in balance, negative and do not promote growth. They might, in fact, be detrimental to the organism's welfare. I think the same is true for humans.

The stimuli that we experience are as vast and complicated as all of life. We are sensitive to the pressures of economics, politics, the work place, relationships inside and outside of the nuclear family, the dynamics of community, the effects of climate change on how we behave and construct our homes and cities, for instance. One can name factors in all aspects of our lives that serve as stimuli for us. Not all of them, of course, are positive in the sense that we learn from them and make positive changes in how we understand and move ahead in our lives. Moving ahead implies growth with the passage of time, just as Darwin understood evolution to underscore changes in morphology over long expanses of time. The dynamic of change suggests that only those responses to stimuli persist because they represent some benefit to the survival of a species. Along the way to some persistent change in morphology or behavior patterns there will probably be certain traits that appear but that are washed out of the system over time.

When I think of the human trajectory over time I imagine that what we think are permanent changes in our patterns of life and our relationships to human constructs, like government or economic systems, will in the long run wash out and some other changes we can't predict will emerge as the ones that bring the greatest accommodation and growth for survival of the species. If one takes this longer view of life and of time, then it is possible to manage the troubling events of the day in a way that dials down fear and anxiety. What we think is dramatically affecting our lives today will lessen and perhaps dissolve altogether over our a short or longer span of time.

I also think we tend to imagine that the stimuli that affect us so noticeably and that we think are stand-alone events are actually manifestations and permutations themselves of multiple stimuli acting to change their character. For instance, we isolate such things as stock market gyrations and political election results as signal events when, in fact, they are just the swings of the pendulum that have been set in motion by global markets and socially agreed upon structures of governance, respectively.

I use the examples of economics and politics because they are so obviously followed by so many people and are used to evaluate the health of a society. But, of course, there are millions of other factors that play into our individual and communal health. In my meditation courses I introduce the idea of what I call the wholeness axis. By that I mean the holistic notion of what it is to be a human being. I tease it apart to work with how body, mind, and spirit contribute to an integration of parts to the whole. In the realm of chronotropism there might be stimuli directed at only the body or only the mind, or spirit. Yet, the entire organism responds in various ways to adjust to the stimulus. From the onset of the stimulus to its being experienced, to the changes that result from it, there is the passage of time. The stimulus causes effects and these effects, in turn, cause new and different things to happen. Time flows on in its natural and unemotional streaming.

When we make an effort to coordinate our thoughts and activities with our physiological rhythms, we are engaging our whole self in ways that allow stimuli/responses to manifest in the dynamics of holistic health. One cannot name a philosopher or scientist (what was Einstein, after all?), poet or playwright, dancer, economist, politician, parent, teacher, who has not dealt in some way with chronotropism in the myriad ways that human cognition and achievement manifest. Each of us does the same no matter how our lives are constructed and play out over time. It affects the babe and the elder, it spans birth to death—and beyond. When we are attuned to the world around us, we respond. When we notice how we respond, we can change in conscious ways, in ways that promote a strong and robust environment in which all of us can participate. This is the growth part of chronotropism. It is a tendency to use the stimuli, even the most noxious, in ways that promote growth. It is one of the paradoxes of our lives that what seems most troublesome and harmful can be the seed of growth-promoting change. Humans have this capacity for conscious choice and to choose that which supports all in a common cause.

I use time wastefully sometimes and wish to take this turn from a passing year to a new one as an opportunity to reflect on just how I am in synchrony with the rhythms of the universe in ways that contribute to my own health and that of the billions of others on this planet—and for the planet itself. How much time do we have? How will we spend this most precious non-renewable resource? Perhaps it is my age that prompts these thoughts, but perhaps it is just a swing of the pendulum of consciousness. Over time, may all of us notice the ways in which we are improving so that we may leave a brighter future to those yet unborn. Isn't this what time is for?