The Lag Of Meaning

Like the lag of the seasons...

It's interesting to revisit my daily diary entries each month because it's a "soft" synchronicity, or rather an opportunity for finding interesting juxtapositions with the past and present.

9/2/2021: There was an article I read a few days ago about mysterious delays in the ocean system just beginning to show since 1990. It takes 30 years for things to move to the point where you start seeing the effects, sort of like the lag of the seasons. There's warming taking place but it's not evident in the atmosphere. The same thing is happening in the media where there's a lag of seasons in the collective unconscious: we're in the season of doom, with months, or even years or decades as "episodes", and probably just as hard as turning around the climate system. As in The Fourth Turning, it is in fact about turning.

What piqued my interest was the idea that synchroncities are essentially neutral "nudges" with no clearly-defined meaning. Like ocean systems, the lag of meaning can be as long as 20 or 30 years.

There were a few videos I had watched about synchronicity--one an interview with psychiatrist Bernard Beitman on his new book Meaningful Coincidences, and an interview with Dr. Tom Myers about his dissertation on synchronicity.

What might seem to be the Universe or angels conducting the earth orchestra, there is inevitably a "Finale" to the final Movement--to perhaps overuse a musical metaphor,--or in the case of Turnings, the turning of winter.

In both the Bernard Beitman and Tom Myers interviews they were sharing their synchronicity stories. We've all had them. I had lots of them in the late 1990s and they came in bunches, like bumping into the same people sometimes in different places in Chicago 10 or 20 miles from where we lived, sometimes in the same restaurants we had never been to. And then they stopped; I don't seem to have them anymore. What is left is the meaning. We like to see them as guides to the future we desire, but they could be warnings or a form of augury (or what I've called "Omenesques"). Synchronicites are potential inflection points that can only finally have meaning much later on. And not everything has a "Finale". As a musician, I cringe when music metaphors become cliches used by non-musicians, as much as I think the "seasons" of history have become cliches. But as Neil Howe noted in his sequel to The Fourth Turning, The Fourth Turning Is Here, perception is almost everything:

"Among social scientists, there has long been agreement that social perception creates its own reality. This bit of wisdom is encapsulated in the so-called “Thomas theorem, coined by two sociologists in 1928: If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

It's the power we give to neutral events. They are essentially affordances of the future that are defined by the accumulation of synchronicties over decades.

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Other September 2nds:

This was an image I took on 9/2/2001 at Federal Plaza in Chicago, 10 days before 9/11 and is the place where protests took place in October 2002 about the impending invasion of Iraq.

9/2/1914

Wittgenstein is unnerved by an enormous battle that has been going on for days. He's reading Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief.

9/2/2004

Hurricane Frances hit Florida, the size of Texas. (Global warming will make these more common).

9/2/2005

New Orleans descends inexorably into chaos. Thousands of people packed into hot stadiums with no food, water, or medical care—totally ignored by FEMA. Journalists are on the front lines getting the true stories of suffering, tales of bodies floating in the veritable cesspool. As of this morning, explosions going off, and the city might burn as well.