Daily Rhythms

Daily Rhythms

Rhythm is the backdrop to our day. Look at your life through the lens of rhythms and notice how many you encounter.

We perform different activities at different frequencies, whether weekly, monthly, or yearly, yet the one with the most impact is arguably the one we repeat most often: the rhythm of our everyday lives.

—Sara Adhitya [15]

Rhythm is something we experience within our own bodies, as we hear or feel our heartbeats or breath. We identify it in other biological processes, such as our circadian rhythm. We see rhythm in the changing seasons or the pattern of sunrise and sunset—things with which to mark the passage of time. The rhythm of the moon gives us tides. There are rhythms found in the hours of our workday, the flow of transportation, and the activity in a town or city. Margaret Mary Barela argues, “The experience of meter, and rhythm as well, is kinetic. It is organic. We experience flow if we allow ourselves to focus on the kinetic aspect of the musical experience.” [16] Identifying and feeling the multiple rhythms in our day helps us appreciate the kinetic reality of rhythm.

We are probably all familiar with the idea that there is something in us that functions like a clock. We can also see regularly recurring rhythms in plants and animals, as if they too function on a clock. Living things seem to have times for rest and times for eating, rhythms that seem to occur on a regular, daily basis. Our biological clocks tick along in pretty steady, reliable rhythms, and they are internal to us.

Rhythm is thus a fundamental part of all living creatures. Sunlight may modify, or entrain, our circadian rhythm as the periods of darkness and light vary throughout the year. But light does not tell us when to get up. Our bodies are already beginning the process of waking up and being ready to start the day before our eyes register the sun through our lids. “Much of the behaviour of living organisms is anticipatory of regular and predictable daily environmental changes,” write Russell G. Foster and Leon Kreitzman in their book Rhythms of Life, “rather than reactive.” [17] Foster and Kreitzman cover years of research showing that biological clocks still operate in plants and animals, even if they are separated from external calibration sources.

When you think about it, internal clocks make evolutionary sense. They allow us to prepare for when conditions are optimal.

Humans are the only species that can create our own optimal conditions. If we’re more creative at night, that’s fine, because we’ve invented artificial light sources. If our bodies aren’t well adapted to living in the desert, no problem; we’ve got air conditioning. For every other living thing on the planet, being able to anticipate things like when a food source will be most abundant is critical to survival. Russell and Kreitzman explain, “Organisms mold their lives around the natural rhythms of their environment rather than try and work against it. If the animal or plant in the wild has the means for predicting regular environmental changes, then it can behave in such a way as to exploit the conditions.” [18]

There is no reason for plants and animals to get away from the rhythms of nature. The rhythms of nature exist and are both strong and consistent: Sunrise. Sunset. The earth will turn and tilt according to schedule, and we will experience both days and years.

But the larger point about biological rhythms means that it may not be so great for humans to completely ignore them. Ultimately, the rhythms of the environment offer some predictability, and “although we may have obscured the natural rhythm that for thousands of years dictated human life, success still comes, just as it did for the ancient Egyptians, from anticipating the future and organizing to meet it.” [19]

In order to anticipate the future, we have to contend with more than naturally occurring rhythms. We also hear and process the rhythms we’ve created. Open your window, and what do you hear? Traffic? Lawnmowers? Construction? Sirens? Navigating through our day means noticing and anticipating the rhythms of traffic or public transportation on our daily commute, the rhythm of people as they walk around buildings or go in and out of stores, when restaurants are open, where entertainment is happening. When it comes to how we live, researcher Sara Adhitya points out in Musical Cities, “the simultaneous presence of such a wide spectrum of rhythms at any given point in time renders urban life a complex, polyrhythmic composition.” [20]

Big cities, towns, suburbs: wherever humans live, there are the rhythms created as we all go about our days.

When we notice the rhythms around us, when we listen to our environment, one result is that we understand what is happening—where cars are, or people. But paying attention to our environment doesn’t only give us a retroactive view. We also use sound information to make inferences about the space we are in, which helps us navigate it better in the immediate future.

There’s a clear connection between how our cities are designed and how we flow through them. Thus, there is a relationship between design and rhythm. For example, Adhitya explains, “Urban designer Jan Gehl observed that streets with uniform, inactive facades (i.e., no openings or activities) motivated people to move past as quickly as possible, whereas a street with varied and active facades encouraged them to stop and linger, filling the street with social life.” [21] The two visions of a city street described in this quote confer the idea of two very different rhythms.

There is a sense, then, that the rhythms we encounter on a daily basis might have a huge impact on how we feel and how much we enjoy our day. Adhitya argues, “We must first be able to speak to our internal rhythms in order to generate the urban experiences we desire.” [22] Given that the rhythm in music can prompt feelings of sadness or excitement, it stands to reason that the daily rhythms we interact with might have a similar effect. Moving quickly around hundreds of people streaming in different directions produces a different emotional state than moving slowly through a park—not that one is better than the other, but the idea is that the rhythm we are following will impact how we feel.

Understanding where and how rhythm is present in our daily lives can offer us insight for how rhythm influences our day. From the innate rhythms of our biology to the external rhythms of our environment, and all the modifications and additions in between, there is no doubt that rhythm is an inescapable part of living.

Rhythm provokes an expectation, arouses a yearning. If it is interrupted, we feel a shock. Something has been broken. If it continues, we expect something that we cannot identify precisely. Rhythm engenders in us a state of mind that will only be calmed when “something” happens. It puts us in an attitude of waiting. We feel that the rhythm is a moving toward something, even though we may not know what that something is.

—Octavio Paz [23]