As I stared out my window this morning, drinking black tea and eating a banana, I stumbled upon a conundrum.

The natural world never appears the same exact way twice. Movies do, at face value, but not the real thing. The snow might fall every year, even the same sort of snow, but we never see the same set of flakes fall in the same way. They will always ride the wind differently, always land in new places. The same car might always be parked in front of the house, but there must be something new inside, or new dirt, or something. New patterns, new microscopic hitchhikers...

I have a penchant for watching some movies to the point that I know every scene, every line, without practicing or studying. They become a part of me. If you have ever had a conversation with me, I've probably pulled up some obscure reference that puts a look on your face so quizzical I need to explain where my most recent words had their origin.

My existence, whether in viewing or listening to music or reading, contains in large part in the repetitive consumption of human creations, not in a raw interaction with an ever-changing yet cyclical nature.

I have recently come to believe this to be a mystical connexion to human origins, to the oral tradition that held our history before heiroglyphics or the alphabet, to the practice of memorizing poetry in grammar school that was only abandoned within the past hundred years.

ASIDE: We live in an experimental time. Population growth and technological progress since the industrial revolution have propelled us into such a state of change that anything being accepted as wisdom must be scrutinized against that which was previously conventional, because there may have been a reason for it that we are now overlooking in our zest for the power of our own ideas.

Should I believe that this exact repetitive nature of human consumption is therefore a stain upon our existence, that we should only interact with the natural world in which things are forever changing, if only minutely? No. This requires some pondering to arrive at a couple of mildly stunning conclusions.

The first regards the natural world. Look at its cyclical nature. Look at the shock it brings to the system to see a blood-red moon, yet even this we can measure to be something that happens twice a year around the globe. A month, or "moonth", is roughly approximated to the time it takes to travel from one full moon to the next. Everything is cyclical in nature, and we can hardly find a sign that doesn't point to something we have seen before, or at least to something we can expect based on what we have already experienced. Therefore, this same sort of repetition, whether in the telling of tales or the memorization of poetry or the watching of movies, is in line with the natural experience intended by the Creator.

Likewise, the repetitive nature of human texts is not purely duplicative. Whether it be the Bible or The Big Lebowski or a Mark Rothko painting, we bring new experiences with every viewing, so this exact mimic of what we had previously seen takes on a whole new shape. The more we see the same thing, the more we understand it, and the better we understand ourselves.

So, nature, unlike television or books, is always just a little bit aesthetically different each time we see it, even if we have seen it before. However, books and television are likewise different each time we see them because of what has come through us in the meantime. Yet both remain entirely cyclical. This is just a small exposition of the nature of all things, which is necessarily dual. Everything is repetitive AND changing. We have free-will that is predestined. Blackness, which appears at first glance to be a magnanimous presence, is the absence of all color, while whiteness, which is associated with purity and newness, is the presence of all color.

Just think what a minute of snowfall could do for you.