Equinox
In this episode, we explore the question of balance within a dynamically changing world
Today is the equinox. Sure, if you’re between the tropics, it doesn’t mean all that much. But if you’re in the north, you’re heading towards the warmth, the spring, turning towards summer; and down here in the south, the summer is coming to its end, and we’re heading into the dark, towards the cold of winter. And for those regions that still do it, the clocks will change around now, too: spring, forward; fall, back.
It’s that moment in the year when the length of day and night are exactly the same; a sort-of balance-point within the cycles of time.
Yet unlike the solstices, where the term literally means ‘the standing of the sun’, here the change is happening fast. Yes, each equinox - literally, ‘equal night’ - is that moment in the year when the length of day and night are exactly the same: but it’s only a very brief moment, and even by the following day they’re already far out of balance again. It’s only around the solstices that everything slows down, then a long drawn-out pause where change is all but imperceptible. But here, no: whichever direction it’s moving in at this time of year, it’s moving fast.
The revolution of the year: up, down, up, down, lurching from season to season, with each season now becoming ever more extreme…
Revolutions in politics seem to be much like that, too. Up and down, up and down, round and round in the same old cycles and circles; lurching relentlessly from one extreme to another to another, from burned-out and broken, to a frigid, frightened folly, and then back again, time after time after time…
And we can’t afford to do that any more. We really can’t. Not now. Not ever. Not in any sense of ‘afford’, either.
Is there no way we can get to a better balance than that?
All those different trade-offs: equity versus equality versus identicality and all that. Everyone is different, everyone is the same, everyone has their own ‘station in life’, we’re told - yet there’s no train between the stations any more, and everything changing so fast anyway that there’s now no station even to be stationary at.
Equinox: does that just mean there’s only ever equal night now, yet never equal day? A world of equinox that’s now so fast becoming equi-noxious that it’s equally poisonous to us all?
How do we get to a better balance than that?