Today is the Winter Solstice, the day when the sun stretches out to its farthest point from the earth, pauses, and begins its return. I haven’t had time to write my regularly scheduled essays during the holiday season, so consider this a brief installment in my series about mechanical thinking.
Most English-speaking Westerners probably think of the seasons much in the same way as they think of a clock. That makes sense. The hands go around the face, just as our movement around the sun determines the amount and the angle of daylight we get. We keep time by a calendar, divided into four quarters, each of which is named by a season: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. These seasons correspond to certain weather.
When on occasion, it’s 80 degrees in late December, we remark that it’s unseasonably warm. Our expectations of experience track with our correspondences to our seasonal calendar. We’d be shocked if it were pitch dark at noon, or the sun blazed at midnight. To some extent, our time structures for a single day are transposed onto the seasons. The light during the daytime does vary in length, but we never have radical differences day to day.
Seasons don’t work like that. We can have days, even months that fail to resemble the expected seasonal patterns. Certain places have four distinct seasons, but others might have two: wet and dry, and in a drought, it’s hard to spot more than one. In a place like Louisiana, where I grew up, we might have hints of all four, but during November we can get “fall” weather, a hot “summer” day, or a freeze. The weather follows tendencies, but not rules. It doesn’t tick like a clock.
Benjamin Whorf points out that some American Indian languages don’t have nouns for seasons. Rather, an equivalent of “Winter” might only be used as a verb—(it) winters. You would never say this in late December if it were 80 degrees. In fact, you might say (it) summers.
It’s a fairly obvious error to apply thinking from a domain where it follows a clear pattern (like the amount of light at different times of day) to one where it doesn’t. Seasons have tendencies, of course, maybe very reliable ones, but the variety is immense, even in one place. How many times are we surprised—even upset—when the weather refuses to conform to an expected seasonal pattern?
If the heavens move like clockwork, well, that’s because we built our clocks on the movements of the heavens. Those movements have great influence, but unlike the gears of a Swiss watch, they don’t produce the exact same experience every time. This series will explore many, many ways that our thinking remains encumbered by expectations that work best with machines, but fall apart in the real world. Why would anyone be surprised by unseasonable rain, cold, or anything else? We have all lived through such instances before. But we’ve grown into the habit of expecting a noun to describe an enduring state rather than a shifting process. Machines are very reliable. Seasons tend toward certain behavior, but vary immensely.
If we want to know the weather, though, we need only note the day and look around. Today is the Winter Solstice. When does the sun rise, and what does the sky look like? Where does the light strike first? What part of the world outside your home gets dark soonest? Is it cold, hot? Rainy, dry? Don’t expect the same thing next year, though you may well get it.
The best antidote for mechanical thinking is to use your senses. We expect machines to operate the same way every time. But when we attend to the world around us as it actually happens, we find a different kind of order. I think that good art, fine views, and most beautiful things give us a lot of what we expect, but defy us in the details, and reward a closer look with a wealth of wonderful surprises.
Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, and during whatever winter holiday you celebrate, may you ease your expectations just enough to enjoy the living beauty of the season.